Bug 24018 which appears to be a showstopper for running Cygwin on Wine

[Hin-Tak Leung]

--- On Tue, 25/6/13, Alan W. Irwin <irwin at beluga.phys.uvic.ca> wrote:

<snipped>
> I currently have no experience with Cygwin and my only real
> interest
> in Cygwin on Wine is it theoretically provides an
> alternative build
> platform to my present successful work with the combination
> of MinGW,
> MSYS, and Wine as a Windows build platform. But I haven't
> even been
> able to get started with Cygwin on Wine because of this
> showstopping
> bug. Therefore, I am mentioning the situation here in the
> hope that
> some wine developer on this list with some knowledge of
> Cygwin will
> take the responsibility of making a proper bug report to the
> Cygwin
> mailing list (which according to http://cygwin.com/problems.html is
> the correct place to report Cygwin bugs) including the
> evidence that
> the issue is a Cygwin regression (assuming investigation of
> older Cygwin
> versions with Turkin's test supports that conclusion).
<snipped>

FWIW, the fact that cygwin's setup has problems working doesn't not stop you from *trying* cygwin - it doesn't do very much more than just unpacking tar.tgz files, which you can do manually. And for many command-line utilities, just have the exe and the dll around is enough.

However, I found that cygwin version of a few utlities does not work correctly uner wine (it obvious does for some under genuine windows). While the mingw/gnuwin32 equivalent, do. echo and cat were two I had problems with, when I accidentally let some 3rd party's installer put cygwin's cat/echo in front of gnuwin32's cat/echo in my $PATH under cmd.

Also, I believe MSYS and Mingw do not depends on cygwin. cygwin and msys/mingw are rather different. For building windows applications, you really want to stick with mingw if you can.

And, I found cross-compiling works well enough that I don't bother with having a mingw-based dev system under wine. And if I need MS VC specifically, that works well under wine so; so there has not been any need for running mingw or cgywin under wine for a while. I can tell you from first hand experience that mingw gcc/g++ works well under wine, but many times slower compared to cross-compiling. I think the speed problem comes from fork/exec being slow in wine.