From: PRI AT cddk DOT dk (Peter Ring) Subject: RE: GNU-Win32 distribution question 12 May 1998 16:24:10 -0700 Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: "'Geoffrey Noer'" , "'gnu-win32 AT cygnus DOT com'" 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 - For help on using this list (especially unsubscribing), send a message to "gnu-win32-request AT cygnus DOT com" with one line of text: "help".