Re: Win32 port patches submitted

Hannu Krosing wrote:
> Bruce Momjian kirjutas P, 26.01.2003 kell 05:07:
> 
>>Tom Lane wrote:
>>
>>>Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> writes:
>>>
>>>>I don't see a strong reason not
>>>>to stick with good old configure; make; make install.  You're already
>>>>requiring various Unix-like tools, so you might as well require the full
>>>>shell environment.
>>>
>>>Indeed.  I think the goal here is to have a port that *runs* in native
>>>Windows; but I see no reason not to require Cygwin for *building* it.
>>
>>Agreed.  I don't mind Cygwin if we don't have licensing problems with
>>distributing a Win32 binary that used Cygwin to build.  I do have a
>>problem with MKS toolkit, which is a commerical purchase.  I would like
>>to avoid reliance on that, though Jan said he needed their bash.
> 
> 
> IIRC mingw tools had win-native (cygwin-less) bash at
> 
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/

Have been watching this ongoing conversation and am in two frames of 
mind about:
 + There are a lot of people on Win32 that are using MS Visual C or 
Visual Studio
 + There are a few fairly well established Win32 programming IDE's that 
are compatible with cygwin/mingw32

The advantages to having the Win32 port be natively compatible with 
Visual Studio is that it already is (no toolset-porting work needed 
there), but the disadvantage is that not just any Win32 
user-with-an-interest can download it any try it out.  So... that kind 
of excludes it somewhat (Universities/colleges might have a problem too).

The advantages of having the Win32 port be natively compatible with 
gcc/cygwin/something is that once it's converted to that toolchain, it 
might be a lot less maintenance on us, as that's the toolset we use for 
the Unix builds.

As a thought, the open source Dev-C++ IDE (Win32 and Linux) works with 
gcc/cygwin/mingw32 and is pretty popular.  Just checked it's homepage on 
SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dev-cpp/) and it's download 
figures are pretty large.  Since March 2002 (less than 1 year ago), it's 
been downloaded about 120,000,000 times.  Wow.  120 Million downloads in  less than 1 year.  That's a pretty popular
IDE(16th most popular 
 
project on SourceForge)

Anyway, as a thought, my vote would be to make the Win32 port work in 
with our toolchain or very similar (cygwin/mingw32/etc) if possible, so 
we don't have to rely on people having Visual C.  In developing 
countries too, it's going to be much easier for people to get a hold of 
things like Dev-C++ into the future as well.

Hope this provides a useful set of thoughts.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

-- 
"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there."
- Indira Gandhi