Austin is basically right – nobody should use CygWin as a Windows
development platform/IDE/whatever. And nobody should use CygWin for Ruby
or Rails work of any kind on a Windows platform, since everything you
need is available in native form (the One-Click installer, Instant
Rails, and a native Windows PostGreSQL).
However, someone (Larry Wall??) flagged laziness as a virtue, so I’ll
ignore Austin’s complaints about laziness and continue to use CygWin for
times when someone gives me 15 minutes to get a job done on a Windows
platform that would take me several hours or several days to do if I had
to
a. Locate a native Windows tool to do it,
b. Install the Windows tool and
c. Learn how to use the Windows tool.
a. Locate a native Windows tool to do it,
b. Install the Windows tool and
c. Learn how to use the Windows tool.
I haven’t followed this thred so don’t know if it’s been mentioned, but
if
your stuck on windows and don’t want to use native windows, maybe try
colinux?
http://www.colinux.org/
I ran that a year or so ago, not ruby, but Apache, PHP, PostgreSQL. If
those all work, I can’t see why ruby wouldn’t.
My memory is it was oodles faster than cygwin. I seem to remember
they’ve
made some progress with the networking to make it appear as your own ip
(similar to cygwin) instead of needing it’s own… but i could be wrong
about that.
-philip
On 10/27/06, Philip H. [email protected] wrote:
I haven’t followed this thred so don’t know if it’s been mentioned, but if
your stuck on windows and don’t want to use native windows, maybe try
colinux?
I believe coLinux was mentioned a few times in that thread 
–
Robert W. Oliver II
President, OCS Solutions, Inc. - Web Hosting and Development
Toll-Free Phone - 1-800-672-8415
OCS Ruby Forums - http://www.rubyforums.com/
My Blog - http://www.rwoliver.com/
On 10/28/06, Robert O. [email protected] wrote:
Robert W. Oliver II
President, OCS Solutions, Inc. - Web Hosting and Development
http://www.ocssolutions.com/
Toll-Free Phone - 1-800-672-8415
OCS Ruby Forums - http://www.rubyforums.com/
My Blog - http://www.rwoliver.com/
“Austin is basically right – nobody should use CygWin as a Windows
development platform/IDE/whatever.”
Why? I have a case, where my office PC has only Windows and my
development machines that stores the projects and where my programs
run is Linux machines and I access it remotely through samba/putty.
I use Emacs extensively, call me naive if you will…but i needed X
Window with Emacs for certain lisp packages that i use. Then i looked
into Windows version of Emacs.
- I needed latest Emacs from CVS -meaning got to compile the thing
- Tried using W32Emacs…but since it was a binary install…few of
my lisp packages refused to work.
I already had cygwin installed…so i took the plunge…and compiled
Emacs from CVS under cygwin and it works pretty nicely.
Though i agree, you can’t use cygwin to host your RoR projects…even
in development. But its fine…if you are using it as a IDE/UNIX
toolchain.
On Oct 27, 2006, at 5:43 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
Austin is basically right – nobody should use CygWin as a Windows
development platform/IDE/whatever.
Actually, I think Cygwin is a pretty reasonable platform for porting
Unix apps to Windows. It made it possible for my company to use our
Unix build system (make files and shell scripts) under Windows more
or less directly, without any radical changes. Not having to
maintain separate Unix and Windows build systems is a huge plus and I
don’t think it would have been possible without Cygwin. (…at least,
not without much more effort.) One big win is that Cygwin tools are
flexible about pathnames, and typically accept either Unix-style
(forward slashes), Windows-style (volume names and backslashes) and
mixed-format (volume names and forward slashes) pathnames. MS
Services for Unix, in particular, is much less flexible in this
regard, it would have required a lot more work to port our shell
scripts to SFU. If I was starting a fresh project, I might try to
use a higher-level language like Ruby as the engine for cross-
platform builds, but that’s not the typical scenario, at least in our
business.
TomP
On 10/27/06, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky [email protected] wrote:
Austin is basically right – nobody should use CygWin as a Windows
development platform/IDE/whatever.
Ed, Austin what shocks me is that you claim to know what somebody else
should do!
I would love to tell people that they should not use Windows (as an
example)
but by what right could I do that?
So by what right do you do that?
If I did not appreciate the contributions of both of you very much I
would
not even read that stuff, it is really strange, it feels as it was not
you,
especially Ed, because it became quite obvious that Austin really hates
Cygwin, but why not let us use it in peace?
Well I made my point, hopefully, and even if not, nuff said on this
topic.
Cheers
Robert
–
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress
depends on the unreasonable man.
On 10/28/06, Tom P. [email protected] wrote:
On Oct 27, 2006, at 5:43 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
Austin is basically right – nobody should use CygWin as a Windows
development platform/IDE/whatever.
Actually, I think Cygwin is a pretty reasonable platform for porting
Unix apps to Windows. It made it possible for my company to use our
Unix build system (make files and shell scripts) under Windows more
or less directly, without any radical changes.
So. Is your company’s product open source? Because if it isn’t, and
you’re distributing it, you’re violating the GNU GPL for Cygwin1.dll.
In other words, if you’re distributing your software on Windows with
Cygwin, your software is now infected with the GNU GPL.
-austin
On 10/28/06, Austin Z. [email protected] wrote:
So. Is your company’s product open source? Because if it isn’t, and
you’re distributing it, you’re violating the GNU GPL for Cygwin1.dll.
In other words, if you’re distributing your software on Windows with
Cygwin, your software is now infected with the GNU GPL.
I think this is where we got off track.
Nowhere did anyone mention that they were using Cygwin as a development
toolchain to produce Windows software. It was just stated that several
people here use it as a UNIX environment on Windows.
And, if you do compile software inside Cygwin, that isn’t breaking the
GPL,
because either the software you’re compiling is either open source
already
(likely) or its your code that you aren’t distributing.
–
Robert W. Oliver II
President, OCS Solutions, Inc. - Web Hosting and Development
Toll-Free Phone - 1-800-672-8415
OCS Ruby Forums - http://www.rubyforums.com/
My Blog - http://www.rwoliver.com/
On Oct 28, 2006, at 12:57 PM, Austin Z. wrote:
So. Is your company’s product open source? Because if it isn’t, and
you’re distributing it, you’re violating the GNU GPL for Cygwin1.dll.
Thanks for your concern, but I didn’t say we were using the Cygwin
DLL. We’re using the Cygwin shell and Cygwin tools to build our
software as regular Win32 apps using Microsoft & Intel compilers;
there’s no compatibility layer, beyond what we created ourselves (and
not much was required). The point was, Cygwin lets us do that with
the same build scripts and makefiles that we use for the Unix
builds. For the first Windows port we did, we used a Visual Studio
project that was maintained in parallel with the Unix makefiles; it
seemed like a good idea at the time, because it was the “Windows
way”. It was a nightmare to maintain, however, and less transparent
and flexible than our Unix build system. Using Cygwin lets us work
from the same code base, using the same build system, on all
platforms. All of our Unix test scripts run under Cygwin, as well.
There was a little work required to get things to work seemlessly,
but it really works quite well. It’s not perfect, and we’ve kept our
eyes open for better alternatives, but the ones we’ve looked at
seriously (like ‘Services for Unix’) seem to have worse problems than
the Cygwin-based system.
TomP
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
a. Locate a native Windows tool to do it,
b. Install the Windows tool and
c. Learn how to use the Windows tool.
d. realize how maddeningly frustrating it is when the Windows tool is
only 80% correct in what it’s doing and ultimately revert back to
Cygwin.
There’s also the Services for Unix, which provides a (very) limited set
of unixy tools, but when I’m stuck on Windows I too simply must have
cygwin. Anyone who believes there’s a usable Windows equivalent for
every day-to-day unix CLI app is just plain wrong.
On Tue, 31 Oct 2006, Michal S. wrote:
I use msys [1] when I want something like unix environment on Windows.
To me it looks lighter than cygwin, and I get a toolchain that does
not require cygwin1.dll (which causes many compatibility problems from
what I have heared). But it may not be able to support some stuff that
works under cygwin.
I saw projects that use msys but I haven’t built anything useful with
the compiler. I just use the shell and diff when I need that.
i’ve compiled both the gnu scientific library, narray, and rbtree
packages for
use on a window box here at work using msys. all are immensely useful
and
easy to compile under msys. fyi.
-a
On 10/29/06, Charles Oliver N. [email protected] wrote:
platform that would take me several hours or several days to do if I had to
cygwin. Anyone who believes there’s a usable Windows equivalent for
every day-to-day unix CLI app is just plain wrong.
I use msys [1] when I want something like unix environment on Windows.
To me it looks lighter than cygwin, and I get a toolchain that does
not require cygwin1.dll (which causes many compatibility problems from
what I have heared). But it may not be able to support some stuff that
works under cygwin.
I saw projects that use msys but I haven’t built anything useful with
the compiler. I just use the shell and diff when I need that.
Thanks
Michal
[1] http://www.mingw.org/msys.shtml
