RE: [Caml-list] Some comments on recent discussions

[Gerd Stolpmann <info@gerd-stolpmann.de>]

Am Mittwoch, den 14.12.2011, 19:41 +0000 schrieb David Allsopp:
> Gerd Stolpmann wrote:
> > Am Mittwoch, den 14.12.2011, 09:27 -0800 schrieb Aleksey Nogin:
> > > On 14.12.2011 04:52, Gerd Stolpmann wrote:
> > >
> > > > I don't think you will be able to convince everybody - at this point
> > > > the issue becomes political in some sense: Do we want to give up our
> > > > Unix habits just to support an OS we (often enough) do not like, and
> > > > would only cover to get more love from the world?
> > > >
> > > > There could be an alternative: The "busybox approach". We could
> > > > develop a toolkit that covers all the Unix commands we need for the
> > > > existing build scripts. It would include easy things like cp, mv
> > > > etc., but also a classic "make" (medium difficulty, note that it
> > > > could reuse the godi_make code), and especially a POSIX shell. The
> > > > latter is a bit of work, but not too much. I'd guess the overall
> > > > effort takes not more than
> > > > 1-2 weeks if done by somebody how knows the semantics of the tools
> > > > very well.
> > > >
> > > > There are a number of advantages over Cygwin:
> > > >  - No danger of running into licensing problems
> > > >  - The Unix compatibility is only maintained for commands, but not on
> > > >    the system call level (eaiser to use, less surprises, fewer
> > > > deps,...)
> > > >  - It would only be a small download, and easy to integrate into
> > > >    installers
> > >
> > > Note that to a degree, OMake already provides the ability to do
> > > Unix-style things under Windows.
> > 
> > I know, and this makes me quite optimistic that it is not that hard to
> > develop standalone executables for the frequently used Unix utilities.
> 
> Any particular reason why the GnuWin32 project doesn't already fulfil this requirement (http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/)?

Interesting collection, but it misses a shell.

Also, I'm unsure about several details. In particular, how the
command-line arguments are passed down to the started process. The win32
idea of command-line is a big mess, and you will continuously run into
problems if you just keep it. Cygwin works around by providing an
alternate path for passing the command-line down to the started process.
I fear we also would need such a mechanism. (The GnuWin32 docs do not
explain completely what they do, but it reads as if they just keep the
win32 conventions.)

Because of this, I'm still favoring a clean reimplementation, at least
of sh, make, and the frequently used file utilities. GnuWin32 might be
an interesting fallback source for complicated commands where we can
live with limitations (e.g. awk, which also sometimes appears in build
scripts, but would be a tremendous amount of work to reproduce).

Gerd
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