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(at)gmx(dot)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