Re: autoconf in pure MSVC environment?

[Russ Allbery]

Brandon J Van Every <address@hidden> writes:

> No.  What happens in practice, is you have Cygwin vs. MinGW, building
> with Cygwin library vs. -fno-cygwin library, and support tools like GNU
> Make, bash, etc. all at different version levels.  The same is true for
> all the underlying open source libraries that a moderately complex
> project uses.  It's a nightmare.  It's all completely broken crap.  It
> works ok on UNIX because the tools are getting built, tested, and
> updated all the time.  That testing never happens on Windows, so to
> quote Chinua Achebe, "Things Fall Apart."

> UNIXen tend to just glare at me when I bring these build issues up.  The
> reason they glare is they *NEVER* face these build issues themselves.
> They just assume I'm some kind of whiner.  They assume that UNIX
> reproducibility is Cygwin / Mingw reproducibility.  It just ain't so.

I can certainly agree with that, having dealt with integrating patches for
some packages that have been ported to Cygwin.  Porting is indeed
required; Cygwin is not Unix, and various standard Unix things do not work
the way that one would expect.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>