[wine-devel] Re: [wine-devel] Re: Bug 24018 which appears to be a showstopper for running Cygwin on Wine

[Austin English]

On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 7:11 PM, Alan W. Irwin <irwin at beluga.phys.uvic.ca> wrote:
> On 2013-07-01 19:58+0100 Hin-Tak Leung wrote:
>
>> --- On Mon, 1/7/13, Alan W. Irwin <irwin at beluga.phys.uvic.ca> wrote:
>> ... I hope your negative
>>>
>>> attitude
>>> toward the Cygwin toolchain is not typical of such
>>> developers.  After
>>> all, even though the Windows GNU toolchain code bases have
>>> diverged
>>> between the two groups of developers, there is still a
>>> common interest
>>> between MinGW and Cygwin developers regarding getting the
>>> GNU
>>> toolchain to work properly on Windows.
>>
>> ...
>>
>
>> Look. You have been advised a few times, that it is possible and
>
> even easy to bypass installation-related problems and been given brief
> instructions on how to do so.
>
> The problem discussed on this thread is not with the generic part of
> the installation you have referred to but instead the problem is with
> running one of the post install scripts that is invoked by setup.exe.
>
>
>> you have also been told, *many times*,
>
> and *by the cygwin developers*, that you are just encounter one
> problems out of many, and there are more problems to come, in the
> thread you posted to the cygwin mailing list.
>
> Many times by you and once by a Cygwin developer.  I have answered both,
> but I am going to try again now since you brought it up again.
>
> Even if that assertion were true (something we don't know until some
> Wine developer with an interest in Cygwin systematically looks at it
> for the latest Wine to see how many Cygwin bugs are left for that much
> improved version of Wine) it only strengthens my argument. The fact
> remains, Cygwin is open-source software so in theory (i.e., the Wine
> developer pursuing this opportunity will need some knowledge of
> Cygwin) you know exactly what is going on with the calls to Windows
> software, and you can also directly compare results for those calls
> between the Wine version and Microsoft version of Windows. Therefore I
> think it is obvious that Cygwin represents a good opportunity to get
> rid of Wine bugs.  If there are a lot of such bugs like you and the
> Cygwin developer assert, then it represents even a bigger opportunity
> to debug those Wine issues with exact source code in hand that
> demonstrates the issue.  I think we don't really know what
> bugs are still left in recent Wine until a systematic evaluation is
> done of Cygwin on Wine, but my argument stands whether
> there are a lot of such bugs or only a few.

While it's likely that debugging this (and other) Cygwin problems with
Wine would find and eliminate bugs from Wine, it also takes a lot of
effort and know how to do so. That time is often better spent on
issues that require less effort to debug, and help more user visible
applications.

In other words, while fixing Cygwin issues is a valuable effort, it
takes a lot of time and effort that is better spent elsewhere. If you
want to spend that time and effort, feel free to do so. But asking
others to spend their time to debug issues that fix Cygwin isn't
likely to find many volunteers.

--
-Austin