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Re: some emacs-21.1.1 problems
From: |
Eli Zaretskii |
Subject: |
Re: some emacs-21.1.1 problems |
Date: |
Fri, 23 Nov 2001 15:10:36 +0200 |
> From: David Kastrup <David.Kastrup@t-online.de>
> Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.bug
> Date: 23 Nov 2001 11:58:08 +0100
>
> >>>>> "Eli" == Eli Zaretskii <eliz@is.elta.co.il> writes:
>
> >> From: David Kastrup <David.Kastrup@t-online.de>
> >> Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.bug
> >> Date: 22 Nov 2001 21:24:35 +0100
> >>
> >> From the above, BTW, I get the impression that the first thing you
> >> should throw out, free or not, is Cygwin.
>
> Eli> Apart from Cygwin and DJGPP, there's no other comparable effort
> Eli> to port GNU software to Windows, so Windows users who cannot
> Eli> toss Windows have nowhere else to go.
>
> We were talking just an Emacs port and I have to say I find it
> surprising that you snipped my reference to mingw32 in order to make
> your point. Emacs compiles with mingw32 and then should not exhibit
> the multitude of idiosyncrasies the original poster encountered.
AFAIU, we were talking about ports of GNU software _besides_ Emacs.
Jason made his remark about a program that wouldn't work with Emacs
because that program was a Cygwin port, while Emacs wasn't.
That's why I didn't keep the reference to the MinGW build of Emacs: it
was IMHO irrelevant to the Cygwin program that started this
discussion, which wasn't Emacs.
If I misunderstood the issue at hand, I apologize for the line noise.
> While the mingw32 might not be a "comparable effort", I find it
> laudable that they don't go to such lengths of making the environment
> seem what it isn't.
I agree. The problem which Windows users face is that you can't
easily find MinGW ports of GNU utilities beyond the most basic ones
(Emacs, GCC, Binutils, and Make).
> In short, I consider the decidedly smaller effort a good design
> decision.
Actually, it takes more effort to produce a MinGW port than to
produce the Cygwin port. Cygwin tries to hide the problems inside
the C library, and the Cygwin ``ports'' are simply straight
compilations of the original sources. The problem with this approach
is that the library doesn't know enough about the context to DTRT in
some subtle cases. The _real_ solution to this is to make changes to
the application sources (e.g., when some code assumes every absolute
file name begins with a slash), but Cygwin ports don't do that. To
do that correctly requires to go through the whole application source
and modify it where appropriate. That's a non-trivial job.
- Re: some emacs-21.1.1 problems, (continued)
- Re: some emacs-21.1.1 problems, Richard Stallman, 2001/11/23
- Re: some emacs-21.1.1 problems, David Kastrup, 2001/11/24
- Re: some emacs-21.1.1 problems, Miles Bader, 2001/11/24
- Re: some emacs-21.1.1 problems, David Kastrup, 2001/11/24
- Re: some emacs-21.1.1 problems, Miles Bader, 2001/11/24
- Re: some emacs-21.1.1 problems, David Kastrup, 2001/11/24
- Re: some emacs-21.1.1 problems, Miles Bader, 2001/11/24
- Re: some emacs-21.1.1 problems, Miles Bader, 2001/11/24
- Re: some emacs-21.1.1 problems, David Kastrup, 2001/11/24