Re: New Port Suggestion

[Christopher Faylor <me at cgf dot cx>]

On Sat, Oct 30, 2004 at 06:15:20PM -0500, Aaron W. LaFramboise wrote:
>I think the real trouble here is the name, MinGW.  I think its just a
>historical relic of the port, which came from Cygwin, which wasn't
>"MinGW."  I would be very tremendously happy if we could just start
>calling it i686-pc-windows, or *-win32, or whatever, if only so my
>collegues would understand that the Windows target can be as first-order
>as the other targets.  Besides, theres no *-MinGSolaris or *-MinGARM.

I agree that this should be just called i?86-*-windows.  It would take
some effort to progate this throughout the gcc, binutils, and gdb
toolchains, though.

>Maybe this way originally done backwards.  The normal Windows port
>should have come first, and POSIX support added later, in a library,
>just as we add support for any other interface.  Then there would be no
>*-mingw32, no *-cygwin, and no "winsup"; there would only be *-windows
>and -lposix, or whatever.

The original goal of Cygwin was to get stuff working on Windows with a
minimal amount of changes to gcc, binutils, gdb, bash, make, etc.
Eventually, Cygwin's existence provided a comfortable environment for
the more challenging task of adding native support to gcc and binutils.
Porting individual programs to native windows obviously requires
separate effort for each program while the existence of cygwin means
that it is possible to just copy source files to a windows system and
just compile them.

I think it's pretty obvious that something like Cygwin was and is the
most optimal way to get things working on Windows.  And, before anyone
makes an obvious point -- yes, I know that Cygwin programs have a lot
of overhead that pure Windows programs do not but that is entirely
besides the point.

cgf