Re: [Caml-list] Re: MinGW port w/o Cygwin?

[Kuba Ober <ober.14@osu.edu>]

On Friday 21 December 2007, Dmitry Bely wrote:
> On Dec 20, 2007 11:18 PM, Kuba Ober <ober.14@osu.edu> wrote:
> > Tried it and sure enough - it works!!! (On an XP machine that never saw
> > Cygwin either).
> >
> > That's *extremely* good news to me.
> >
> > I guess that Ocaml maintainers should just drop that Cygwin requirement,
> > and tweak their build process to work "out of the box" with MSYS/MinGW.
>
> If MSYS become mandatory I strongly disagree. Cygwin is a common
> requirement for building any Ocaml distribution on Windows (even if
> you use Microsoft Visual Studio). I see absolutely no problem to
> install and use it. Why I should bother to install another Cygwin fork
> (MSYS) and handle name clashes etc.?

Cygwin and MSYS are very different. Calling one another's fork is like saying 
that Linux and FreeBSD are both UNIX forks.

Cygwin is a make-believe unix environment on WIndows. It's a big hack.

MSYS is just a bunch of Unix tools ported to run *natively* on Windows.

Cygwin is a common requirement because it makes things simpler on the surface. 
When in fact, it makes everything much worse off.

Cheers, Kuba