On Sun, 2007-06-24 at 13:10 -0400, Matthew Danish wrote:
Unfold MinGW, MSYS, and MSYS Developer Tool Kit.
Hmm .. well I'm not sure if this is still correct, but Mingw, being a Windows program, has 255 character limit on command line .. which makes it useless for building anything complex. Ocaml had this problem: the MinGW version of Ocaml has to be built using Cygwin, with gcc using the -mnocygwin option. The thing is .. Cygwin, despite being rather large, is much easier to install than MSYS because of the package manager. Also there are many emulations of Unix programs for Windows, located at: http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ which are also fairly easy to install and work from the CMD.EXE command prompt. The problem with building on Windows is that many scripts assume bash, and it just doesn't work 'right' outside a well configured Unix environment. Cygwin does this quite well .. MSYS etc doesn't. I'm not intending to knock MSYS .. but I wouldn't rely on it for building complex projects 'transparently' .. Cygwin has enough problems doing that, and it's quite a sophisticated environment. The thing is .. Windows *.bat files, though a bit clumsy, work better than trying to get a bash emulation .. but really, designed-to-be-portable code written in Python, Perl, Scheme, or even Haskell is better .. because it eliminates uncertainty and gives you full control of how build actions are implemented on each platform. -- John Skaller <skaller at users dot sf dot net> Felix, successor to C++: http://felix.sf.net