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Message-ID: <52C33350.6070500@cs.umass.edu>
Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2013 16:12:48 -0500
From: Eliot Moss <moss AT cs DOT umass DOT edu>
Reply-To: moss AT cs DOT umass DOT edu
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To: cygwin <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Subject: Re: Ok, then
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Dear Jonathan -- I think it would help greatly,
and perhaps moderate the tone on both sides, if
you could say what you think/thought cygwin is
and what you think/thought it is for.  It seems
to me that the bad feelings, or at least sharp
tone, back and forth may be rooted in a
misunderstanding on your part of what cygwin is
about.  Some posters did suggest reading some
of the overview material describing what cygwin
is and what it is not -- or I could say, what it
is trying to do and what it is *not* trying to do.

For my part, I would describe it as offering a
Unix-like environment to Windows users.  It is
not a whole operating system, and cannot entirely
"hide" the Windows-ness of Windows, but makes it
possible to port and then use many Unix tools in
a fairly natural (for a Unix user) way.

Thus, the ls command is quite natural, since it
is a familiar command to Unix users.  If your
criticism of it is that it is obscure, that is a
criticism of Unix, really, not of cygwin, since
cygwin is not trying to make Unix better or replace
it or anything like that -- it's trying to do more
or less what Unix does.  So, if you are not looking
for something with the "look and feel" of Unix,
cygwin is probably not for you.

Likewise, bash is a shell ported from the Unix
world, and it is what it is.  One virtue is that
bash scripts I wrote to run on Unix platforms
will tend to work under cygwin as well (though
occasionally some tweaks are needed).  This is
a good thing.  Writing some kind of shell that is
better, more natural, etc., from your point of
view is something you are welcome to do -- source
code to a number of shells is out there.  But
the cygwin project isn't about writing a new shell,
only about making one or more shells from Unix work
under cygwin more or less the way they work on Unix.

In hope that this will be of some use ...

Eliot Moss

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