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

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2013-06-29 11:57+0100 Hin-Tak Leung wrote:

> --- On Sat, 29/6/13, Alan W. Irwin <irwin at beluga.phys.uvic.ca> wrote:
>
> ...
>>> The Mingw GNU toolchain works wells under wine. The
>> cygwin GNU toolchain don't, the last time I checked.
>>
>> That may be true, but the best way to make that point about
>> the Cygwin
>> GNU toolchain is with official Cygwin bug reports rather
>> than
>> asserting stuff here in an anecdotal way.
>

> Anytime that a piece of windows software (including Cygwin) works on windows but not on wine, is a wine problem.

No question.  In fact I stated bug reports to Cygwin would probably
only be taken seriously if they included a demonstration of the
problem on the Microsoft version of Windows.

> The fact that the such software developers (cygwin people) are nice enough to respond and adjust their software (cygwin) to fit a *flaw in wine* does not make the problem less a wine one.

This statement misrepresents what has recently occurred with regard to
bug 24018.  Arjen Markus's bug report demonstrated the Cygwin fork
problem on Microsoft Windows.  Because of that the Cygwin developers
were quickly able to verify and fix the problem.

> The various problems of running cygwin in wine are already
well-documented - just do a search on wine's bugzilla (there are over
a dozen of those).

Those have been mentioned before here, and I have looked at them.
Cygwin is a very large collection of software so the number of bugs
that are reported does not seem excessive to me, and for my personal
needs (building and testing software on the Cygwin platform) I will
only be using a subset of Cygwin so I may avoid encountering
some of these bugs. Furthermore, some of these bugs (e.g.,
problems resizing a GUI) are not showstoppers, and most of them are
quite old. At the same time the latest Wine is far superior to
Wine-1.4 so some of those bugs may have just disappeared.  I hope to
find out about the actual status of Cygwin on Wine
bugs once I can get setup.exe to work on Wine.

> So the mere fact that the installer does not work correctly, is just
another such problem.

That's been covered already.  We obviously disagree on this issue.

> Also, running cygwin on wine, compared to other windows software
which has no unix/linux equivalents, is hardly a priority.

That is obviously personally true for you.  And for my personal needs
Cygwin on Wine is a "would be nice" software build and test platform.
That is, it is actually a medium to low priority for me since I
already have plenty to do extending my builds and tests of free
software on the MinGW/MSYS/Wine platform to additional software packages.

But our personal needs are not what is important here. From the more
general perspective any problems running open-source software on Wine
should be easier to debug (since all the details of the exact Windows
system calls are known) than trying to debug problems with running
proprietary software (e.g., some random game) on Wine where you have
to guess at the details.  As an illustration of that, three times
during the 1.5.x series I have found Wine bugs or regressions as a
result of running open source software on Wine. (Thankfully, all of
those have been fixed by the Wine developers.) Cygwin is the largest
distribution of open-source software that runs on Windows.  It follows
that Cygwin represents a good opportunity to find and fix Wine issues.

In sum you have expressed your opinions on Cygwin and Wine and I have
mostly disagreed with those opinions.  Therefore, I think we have covered
everything, and it is time to call a halt to this side-topic.  So from now
on my contributions to this thread will focus on the original topic
which is problems in running setup.exe on Wine, i.e., bug 24018, and I
urge you to do the same.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
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