Re: Reconsideration of MinGW work

[Peter Brett <peter@peter-b.co.uk>]

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).

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*.

I imagine that other applications that link libguile would provide
similar feedback.

Regards,

                                Peter

-- 
Peter Brett <peter@peter-b.co.uk>
Remote Sensing Research Group
Surrey Space Centre