Re: MinGW (Was: Re: PROPOSAL: Variation on an Alternate policy for obsoleting targets)

["Stephan T. Lavavej" <stl at caltech dot edu>]

[Joe Buck]
> you, personally, could work to make things better if you so desire.
> You could be downloading CVS versions, running them, reporting on
> problems, and asking for help with fixes.

I'm trying to learn. I've managed to successfully build 3.3 on GNU/Linux,
but haven't been able to build any version of gcc on MSYS/MinGW (whether
MinGW-patched or not).

I don't entirely understand CVS yet and I have no clue how diffs/patches
work (mechanically, not conceptually). I'm trying to learn, though. When
MinGW gcc 3.3 is released, I'll see if I can bootstrap it, and I'll report
any problems I encounter.

> secondary platforms require a capable volunteer to sign up to be
> the tester and coordinator for any needed bug fixes.
> If a MinGW champion is willing to take on that role, it will happen.

[DJ Delorie]
> The solution to that, is to make those non-gcc developers gcc maintainers.
> So make Danny the MinGW maintainer for GCC.

Hmm. I'll forward this to him.

I didn't want to give the impression that I'm complaining without being able
to contribute anything useful. I did want to make the gcc developers aware
of the plight of the MinGW community (and probably others).

> Don't forget about Cygwin and DJGPP, which also produce programs that
> run under Windows.  Not that I'm putting down MinGW, of course ;-)

I got started with DJGPP under Win98SE, and that worked great. However,
DJGPP executables under WinXP run in the NTVDM - they aren't truly Win32
executables. For example, they don't get their own process name. This causes
them to (1) run slowly, and (2) not at all in extreme cases. I switched from
DJGPP to MinGW when I found that my particularly memory-allocation-intensive
application was performing pathologically under DJGPP but not under MinGW or
GNU/Linux.

And Cygwin, well, those applications require the Cygwin DLL to be installed
on the end user's computer (correct me if I'm wrong).  It's always seemed to
me to be a good solution if you want to simulate GNU/Linux on a Windows
machine, but a bad solution if you want to create executables that you can
distribute to others.

Thanks.
Stephan T. Lavavej
http://www.nuwen.net