Re: [Fwd: Swarm 2.1.1 compile on cygwin for Win 2000]

[Marcus G. Daniels]

>>>>> "PJ" == Paul E Johnson <address@hidden> writes:

PJ> The other "breakage" I see from installing swarm and cygwin
PJ> at the same time happens in my PATH and mounts.  The weird thing
PJ> about cygnus is that it never seems to set the mounts the same way
PJ> twice, depending on which networks I'm logged into and such, I get
PJ> really crazy looking lists of mounts sometimes.  Swarm also tries
PJ> to change mount settings, and sometimes I have trouble getting it
PJ> back the way cygnus wants it.

Swarm sets the mount settings when it is installed.  Afterwards, if
you change them to something else, they will stay that way.

PJ> There are some good reasons to know more about building Swarm with
PJ> current cygnus. For example, currrent cygnus has a working ssh and
PJ> working vi, which are a big plus for me.

The important thing is that someone has made the source code for these
packages compile and work.  On my laptop (under Windows) I have ssh
working fine, as built from the Swarm 2.1.1 distribution.

Caveat: I haven't worked with it in a while, but when I put together
the 2.1.1 CD-ROM, they were just starting getting a package system
together.  One thing I noticed, then, was that they were being lazy
about binary packaging.  Tcl/Tk wasn't rebuilt, they just copied the
DLLs over into the new zip file -- the source code they were
distributing wouldn't build!  So it is possible there are a number of
packages that aren't cleanly buildable.  This is not a good thing.

Swarm includes a from-source build of many GNU packages because
collectively, the `Cygwin distribution' is not a product that has been
tested end-to-end.  They tried to do that for a while, decided it was
too much work, and instead setup this RPM-like system. 

My feeling was that most Windows users of Swarm would not be prepared
to cope with that.  As for `power users', well, they're power users
after all..

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