Firebird uses a set of Borland command line tools and Borland's make,
which they give away as a free download. Even if you're compiling for
Windows, the build process uses Borland's command line "make". A batch
build script copies makefiles from a single source directory and spreads
them around the tree, then kicks off Borland's make. For things to work
successfully, you must download Borland's tools and install them
together with setting a few environment variables by hand. Borland
command line tools are just a set of Unix utilities like grep, sed,
make, (sh?) etc. Once upon a time they required cygwin utilities, but
managed to purge themselves of cygwin with the Borland utilities. When
they required cygwin, they also required some Borland utilities anyway.
So they had a real reason for purging cygwin. If someone thinks the
cygwin package is too big, we could require the Borland utilities instead :)
For my 2 cents, I would say the project files should be a separate
download. Let someone build, test, and contribute them for particular
versions of PostgreSQL. I would only try to make the Visual Studio
files work on true releases. I would _not_ try to keep them updated in
CVS or build them on the fly. W3.org's libwww does it something like this.
bbaker