Re: UnxUtils, Unix tools on Win32

[Greg Chicares]

On 2006-5-19 12:23 UTC, Leeuwesteijn,Joost wrote:
> 
> Hmm, I can't see the advantage of CygWin or MinGW/MSYS just yet. Native
> might perform better and you don't need the DLL but not having to modify a
> package source is also quite (very!) useful.

I take "native" to mean not dependent on a posix-emulation library.

You can use Cygwin or MSYS to build native applications. I've used
MSYS to build gnu make-3.81 and gnu sed-4.0.7 from unmodified FSF
sources, for example. As you say, these native builds probably
perform better than other builds that require an emulation dll,
and not having to modify sources is a very good thing.

Not every package can be built this easily. It's easy for make-3.81
because people who understand how to adapt *nix sources to msw have
worked with the maintainer to make things easy for the rest of us.
Some tools can probably be written completely in portable C (I'd
guess 'rm' would be an example), while others (shells, e.g.) are
much more difficult to get up and running on a different platform.

> My main goal/concern is to put every tool, including its source code, into
> our archive so it can be reproduced/debugged/modified in the future; in case
> of bugs, new requirements or when sites go down. It should be useable even
> after 5 (or 10?) years, and not refer to a 404 website.

Would that be a public repository?

Have you considered using
  http://www.mingw.org/MinGWiki/index.php/mingwPORT
? As I understand it, mingwPORT hosts downloadable patch sets
in a standard template format that makes it easy to grab them
and build them with MSYS. It doesn't incorporate the full source
code, but offers a facility to download it--so it's not identical
to what you want to do, but may be a good means for realizing
your goal. The big advantage for you is that if you share your
patches, others might add enhancements or find and fix problems.

Maybe a concrete example would be clearer: libpng, for instance:
  
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=752210&aid=1227456&group_id=2435
  
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/download.php?group_id=2435&atid=752210&file_id=140473&aid=1227456