On 10/29/06, Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter / sun.com> wrote:
> M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
> > 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.
>
> 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.
>

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