Re: Any active maintainers using MinGW/MSYS?

[Earnie Boyd]

Quoting Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden>:

> > Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2006 18:03:15 -0500
> > From: Earnie Boyd <address@hidden>
> > Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden

> > I don't want MSYS to become Cygwin.  Jonathan had asked how to build an
> > MSYS version (using the MSYS runtime instead of the MSVCRT runtime) and
> > I explained how to do that.  I want it to be as difficult as possible
> > to build source for MSYS because I intentially want people to not want
> > to use the MSYS runtime for their own purposes.
>
> Does that mean you want us to reject any patches to the sources that
> are conditioned on __MSYS__?

Yes, please do.

> (I don't think you can prevent people from building an MSYS port, no
> matter how hard you try, and so making it as difficult as possible is
> just being harsh to them.  But since you are the MSYS maintainer, you
> are free to decide that you don't want to help them.)

Those that are willing to help would have enough tools to make it easy 
enough for that conversion.

> > At the same time it is my desire to use as many native (requiring
> > MSVCRT runtime) binaries as possible within the MSYS toolset framework.
>
> Are there any issues that prevent the native Windows build of Make
> from becoming _the_ MSYS Make that is compatible with the rest of the
> MSYS toolset?  If so, could you or someone else publish the list of
> those issues?

Yes, but I don't know what those are entirely; especially for the 
lastest release candidate.  I haven't spent the time to study what it 
would take to allow a native make to cooperate with MSYS.

> Btw, just so that I understand: what should be the minimal set of
> packages in the MSYS toolchest, ideally?  I'm guessing that it's the
> shell and possibly the patched config.* scripts, but perhaps there's
> something else?  And, with enough patchwork, isn't it possible that
> the need for MSYS will disappear, and users will be able to just use
> native ports of Bash and other utilities?

The MSYS toolset provides an environment to execute configure and make 
whose default host, target and build are MINGW32.  There is no need for 
modified config.* scripts as the defaults already filter for MINGW32.  
This is the msys-1.0.10.exe file.  I added the msysDTK package to 
provide perl, openssl, openssh and cvs because they didn't behave well 
within the MSYS framework in native mode.

It is a dream of mine that enough patchwork be accomplished to replace 
MSYS.  It really would not hurt my feelings at all and I would be 
delighted for that to happen.  I have a plan to add a configuration 
and/or an environment option where the POSIX pathing is removed thanks 
to our discussion on the mingw-msys list.

Earnie Boyd

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