Re: next release of Lout is approaching (mingw vs cygwin)

[KHMan]

Valeriy E. Ushakov wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 16, 2008 at 21:01:27 +0800, KHMan wrote:
> [snip snip snip]
> If by "transitioning to cygwin" you mean no longer providing binary
> release for win32, then I don't see what's the point of this
> discussion.  You don't need to "transition" anywhere to stop providing
> binary releases.  And iirc Lout worked out of the box with cygwin for
> a long time (modulo CRLF problems that are supposed to be fixed now as
> well), so I really don't understand what and why are you going to
> "transition" to.  You are already there. :)

What I was trying to say is, there seem to be some users for the 
MinGW port, and they may have toolchains that are not 
Cygwin-based. "Transitioning" here to me means providing info to 
these users to cover cases for which Cygwin Lout is being called 
by non-Cygwin applications or batch files. This may entail 
non-standard Cygwin practices such as copying the cygwin1.dll 
file. Also, can anyone confirm that DOS paths work in such cases 
of cross-calling? And, that lout and prg2lout works together? Some 
might want to repackage the executable with cygwin1.dll; are there 
issues with such things?

If I were to stop making MinGW binary releases, at least I would 
check those things and confirm that Cygwin Lout is usable for such 
users. If someone on the list can confirm that calling from 
non-Cygwin apps and such works fine, and DOS paths work fine, 
etc., then obviously I would not need to do anything at all. While 
I have technically zero obligation to support anybody, I do not 
want to simply abandon the thing and disappear altogether.

> > Lout is primarily a source release only, and Lout is currently
> > more or less in maintenance mode. I would rather use my time for 
> > better purposes than maintain a legacy binary release. Someone who 
> > releases a binary release has to answer for it (or not, but that 
> > wouldn't be nice) and I don't see myself maintaining MinGW 
> > binaries forever.
>
> What kind of maintenance do you envision for it?

Right. Of course it's easy to put up. Still, I don't see anybody 
stepping up. I still don't see anyone actually doing a proper 
"native" Win32 port. Only two persons did the Lout wiki pages 
refresh. Remember, we are in a resource-scarce situation, and Lout 
I believe is not even near the top of most of our personal 
priority lists. It's easy for users to want this, want that.

Okay, so it's mostly trivial. Let's test the theory. :-) I will 
declare that I won't be updating the MinGW port anymore. I'll just 
be fiddling with the Cygwin port and I'll put up a wiki page on 
that later.

So now let's wait for a better person to take over and improve the 
port and lobby to get appropriate patches to Jeff. :-) :-)

--
Cheers,
Kein-Hong Man (esq.)
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia