Re: Reconsideration of MinGW work

[Neil Jerram <neil@ossau.uklinux.net>]

Peter Brett <peter@peter-b.co.uk> writes:

> Neil Jerram <neil@ossau.uklinux.net> writes:
>
>> I've been making gradual progress on MinGW cross building, but I've
>> reached a point where I'm no longer sure that this is worthwhile.  This
>> email explains why, and invites comments from anyone interested in this
>> - especially from anyone who is really trying to use Guile on Windows.
>
> We get people coming to the gEDA user mailing list on a regular basis
> saying, "Where can I find a version of gEDA for Windows?" and the
> Windows builds we've put out have been generally well-received.  Since
> Guile is one of our core dependencies, lack of Windows support in Guile
> would mean that we wouldn't be able to provide a Windows build at all
> (we already had massive problems at the start of the Guile 1.8.x series
> with GMP portability, or lack thereof, and this meant that it took
> almost three years after 1.8 became the supported stable release for us
> to be able to stop supporting 1.6).

Hi Peter,

I'm sorry, I didn't mean my email to suggest dropping Windows support.
It was more about what more (if anything) is needed for 1.8 releases,
and how to handle Windows support in future, and how those points relate
to a line of work that I've been spending time on recently.

Where are you getting your MinGW guile from at the moment?  Is it that
MinGW SF page that I mentioned, or somewhere else?

> Cygwin isn't an option, unfortunately; we think it's totally
> reasonable for users to want to use the native windowing system, not to
> mention the fact that Cygwin is *dog slow*.

OK, understood.  I'd like to understand more about what makes Cygwin
slow, though, in order to see why a MinGW Guile wouldn't end up being
equally slow.  But in the interim I'm happy to accept that MinGW is
needed.

Regards,
      Neil