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