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

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

On Monday 24 December 2007, Dmitry Bely wrote:
> On Dec 23, 2007 7:33 PM, Adrien <camaradetux@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > 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.
> >
> > You shouldn't see cygwin as a _requirement_.
> > Ocaml installation from source (let the binary distributions be a
> > special case) use C. If there is no c compiler installed as it is
> > under all windows installations (I mean right after setup is
> > completed) ocaml simply can't be installed ; the problem is not with
> > ocaml or cygwin but with windows. Cygwin is not a fancy requirement
> > just one of the few ways to get a c compiler under windows.
>
> Not only compiler; Ocaml build process actively uses various Unix
> utilities that Cygwin provides: make, sh, sed, etc. I see no reason to
> have another set of there utilities in addition to Cygwin's one.

Because this really mixes things up. The Ocaml build environment becomes very 
different from Ocaml execution environment. To a point where if, say, Ocaml's 
build process would use Ocaml at a late point in the process, you'd need two 
Ocaml builds: one native, one cygwin-based. The native one wouldn't dig any 
cygwin paths for example, yet would be what you want to use if you were to 
distribute Ocaml with your commercial application, for example.

Basically, at this point Ocaml is very Windows-unfriendly because of this 
attitude. For a good example of how it shuld work/look, see Trolltech's Qt, 
whose build process works just fine on Windows without bringing in Cygwin or 
even MSYS. It runs using various VC versions, as well as Mingw.

Cheers, Kuba