From: khan AT xraylith DOT wisc DOT edu (Mumit Khan) Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Subject: Re: fall of rsxntdj?? Date: 24 Aug 1999 23:10:15 GMT Organization: Center for X-ray Lithography, UW-Madison Lines: 52 Message-ID: <7pv8on$hcs$1@news.doit.wisc.edu> References: NNTP-Posting-Host: modi.xraylith.wisc.edu To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com In article , Eli Zaretskii wrote: > >> There is a limited set available -- gdb, make, bison, sed, diffutils -- >> but mostly scattered around. > >Are these ports available from the URLs you mentioned in your message? >If not, where are they available? I believe so, but I'll check and make sure when I get some time. >My problem with Cygwin ports is not the slow-down, it's the subtle bugs >and misfeatures. I cannot recommend a set of tools to a user of Windows >if those tools don't support backslashes and drive letters in file names >(try "ls a:\*.c" some day). IMHO, the problem with the Cygwin ports is >that they decided to solve all incompatibilities between Unix and Windows >in the libraries, and leave the application code intact. This simply >doesn't work. Even worse, it *almost* works, leaving the 10% of rare >cases where all kinds of subtle issues bite the uninitiated. Sure Cygwin is buggy -- it's nowhere near as mature as DJGPP. However, lots of people are using it and many may not care about the 10% cases. But that's just a side issue here. I know of Mingw users using UWIN as the platform, and there are others using Interix as the platform. I occasionally build our simulation toolchain (~1M lines of code in written using a variety of languages, configure driven build environment) using Mingw compilers under Cygwin or UWIN and it works. Granted I've had to work around bugs in Cygwin and UWIN (and I remember doing the same on Linux just a few years ago), but it's a viable option. I really don't care what tools people use. It's about having a few choices, and be able to pick the "right" one. The only tools Mingw users seem to always ask for are MAKE and GDB, and I supply both. There are many thousand downloads of egcs-1.1.2 and gcc-2.95 just from my site alone, and there are mirror sites. At least some of those downloads must be in use, and I know of commercial software houses using it for internal development! If DJGPP folks want an alternative to RSXNTDJ and find Mingw acceptable, then someone will have to do the work of getting things to work together. I however don't have time for it, nor do I have the incentive. I can only offer some guidance, and a helping hand if time permits. Of course, if RSXNTDJ is distributed under one of the free licenses, one can just grab a copy, fix it up, repackage it with a new version number, and put it up for distribution. The author may really appreciate the help! While at it, take a look at the current mingw runtime, and see if it can be used instead. Regards, Mumit