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

[David Allsopp <dra-news@metastack.com>]

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/)?


David