> > * As far as I can tell, none of the CHICKEN developers use Windows > > regularly. > > True. I have it running in a VM, but I always start it with a lot of > trepidation and I don't fully understand the OS itself. For example, > suddenly now "make check" has started to give a "permission denied - > cannot delete read-lines.in" error where it's always worked before > and I have no idea why it can't delete it. > > > * There are many combinations of Windows environments, leading to a > > great variety of ways to break stuff. > > They all suck in their own way. I'm kind of thinking maybe we don't > really need the cygwin build anymore now that there's WSL? > > > * We do not have automated tests on Windows. > > > > As a start, it would be nice to collect the information we need in a > > wiki page (e.g., which variants of Windows we want to/can support, how > > they differ etc.). At this point I'm lost at the combinations of > > different Windows things that affect the build/execution of CHICKEN. > > > > I'd say we need help at that so that we can improve support on Windows. > > That's a catch-22 though: in order to get that help, we need CHICKEN > in a useful-enough state that people can use it on Windows. And in > general, out of the total set of users, only a small subset will > actually contribute.
I agree to all of this and I think we can't go on like this. We have to cut down support for all those Windows variants, even for Windows buffs this is a nightmare to maintain (which we aren't). I see only two solutions: - Cut Windows support completely. Yeah, life is hard, but what"s the point if the core developers don't use and don't know it? CHICKEN will always run badly on Windows. - Support a single native variant of Windows, just the bare minimum, provided there is some Mingw/Msys variant that works, and that has at least a small chance of not becoming obsolete instantly. Drop Cygwin, perhaps ensure WSL is a working option. What"s the state of all those Mingw variants? Are there resources where one can find out about this? felix