Subject: RE: GNU-Win32 distribution question
From: [email-masked] (Peter Ring)

12 May 1998 16:24:10 -0700
Message-ID: <c=DK%a=_%p=CD-Danmark%l=[email-masked]>
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To: "'Geoffrey Noer'" <[email-masked]>,
        "[email-masked]'"
	 <[email-masked]>

Guess I'll have to stop lurking and offer my oppinion about the
gnu-win32 distribution, because I'm deeply impressed by the work done so
far, and I'm going to depend a lot on it.

I'm one of those gnu-win32 users who don't mind hacking a bit to get
things working, but rather would just ./configure; make; make install or
rpm -i or something along those lines. I get paid to put an SGML
document processing system working, there's a lot of useful code
developed for various unices, and my company runs its business on
NT/Win95 boxes. In short:

I need traditional Unix text processing tools on an NT box and I want to
be able to port and use new SGML tools such as SGMLTools
http://www.xs4all.nl/~cg/sgmltools/ (was Linuxdoc-SGML).

I have been puzzled by the InstallShield distribution. You won't be able
to do much with the InstallShield distribution except install it;
really, you must also have ncurses, less, groff, man, info etc. etc.
Which implies that the user must have access to GNU source code and know
how to port it. If you want to please Windows users by going the
'native' Windows way with respect to installing and updating gnu-win32,
IMHO you also take responsibility for distributing a full range of
ported applications in that manner (e.g. InstallShield). Mind you, I've
no objections to InstallShield per se. You can check dependencies,
distribute pristine sources with patches etc. in a way similar to RPM
and Debian distributions. It is just not very likely that contributors
will want to do that. If the InstallShield distribution is the only
option, it will certainly imply a departure from the current bazaar
development style
http://earthspace.net/~esr/writings/cathedral-paper-1.html.

Also, the current gnu-win32 filesystem hierarchy is designed to
facilitate sharing the distribution from a Unix box in a
multi-architecture cross-compiler-development environment, which is
natural, given the Cygnus heritage. But how many gnu-win32 users are
going to use it that way? If easy porting of unix (linux, bsd et.)
applications is a primary concern, the distribution _must_ provide a
filesystem hierarchy that will work with most configure scripts and
Makefiles without any hacking.
I have yet to find a way to mount Cygnus\B19\H-i386-cygwin32\bin that
does not bite me one way or another. Is everybody happy with it? How
many of you have developed clever mount schemes or rearranged the
filesystem hierarchy?
Couldn't we just have something a bit more complying with the Filesystem
Hierarchy Standard http://www.pathname.com/fhs/?

Kind regards
Peter Ring
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