Re: [Chicken-users] CMake/MinGW build 325 is using wrong(Unix) filename separat

[Ian Oversby]

> To be technically precise, there is no "mingw" shell.  People primarily use 
> MinGW either under the MSYS shell, or on the normal Windows command line.  
> These are the 2 cases that must be supported robustly.  I have been doing 
> all my development under MSYS, so I have probably failed at straight 
> command line stuff.  I thought Chicken used forward slash paths internally 
> and did conversions at some point, so I've been feeding it forward slashes 
> in the pathnames.
>
> Using MinGW under a Cygwin shell sounds pathological, kinky, error prone, 
> unlikely, and not something we should worry about supporting.  People use 
> MinGW to abandon Cygwin, so that they're not tied to its GPL.  Yes it is 
> possible to get some kind of MinGW behavior by passing certain flags to the 
> *Cygwin* compiler.  I don't know much about this and am not going to be 
> putting any testing time into this.  If someone is heavily using Cygwin 
> with MinGW flags, they can do the support / testing work for this and 
> contribute it to Chicken.

I'm not convinced that MinGW is always used simply to avoid the GPL.  My 
understanding is that MinGW is for building 'proper' Windows applications 
with Win32 etc. and cygwin is for building unix-y applications with a huge 
slow compatibility library to bridge the gulf between Win32 and Posix.  In 
my opinion, cygwin provides a somewhat nicer environment than MSYS for a 
Unix person so it is quite conceivable that someone would want to use cygwin 
for the build environment but use MinGW for the compiler / libraries because 
they want a proper Windows application.  Mind you, I don't really care if 
the cygwin / MinGW combo is unsupported as MSYS is sufficient for me to 
build chicken and I only need to do that once (for some value of once).

Ian