On Thu, 2010-01-07 at 01:26 -0800, Robert Bradshaw wrote: > On Jan 2, 2010, at 10:23 PM, Sturla Molden wrote: > > > Dag Sverre Seljebotn wrote: > > > >> In my experience, Cygwin is often used as an > >> easy way out for porting open source software to Windows, and SFU/SUA > >> seem to exclude at least most of the home users and quite a few > >> laptop > >> users. > > > > First, note that Cygwin is GPL unless you buy a commercial license > > (for a > > fee undisclosed by Red Hat). > > > > The Cygwin fork call is not copy-on-write optimized, which makes > > Cygwin > > unsuited for fork-based internet servers. Also, programs that require > > inter-process read-only access to huge memory buffers can avoid using > > shared memory by forking. This trick will not work on Cygwin. > > > > And then there is the security issue. How safe is Cygwin against > > various > > exploits? As far as I can tell, there is no auto-update of system > > components. > > > >> Can one compile gcc for SFU/SUA? Does that have less or more problems > >> than gcc for Cygwin? > > > > gcc is the system C compiler on Interix. Microsoft is for some > > reason not > > using their own C compiler, but rather relying on gcc. Perhaps > > Visual C++ > > did not pass UNIX certification; or perhaps this is a decision to make > > porting from Linux easier. I don't know. But in any case, gcc is > > preinstalled, you can build your own, or download one here: > > > > http://www.suacommunity.com/tool_warehouse.htm > > > > Personally I prefer Sun's VirtualBox (PUEL license, not the GPL > > version) > > with a modern Linux or Unix to Cygwin or Interix. > > > > http://www.virtualbox.org/ > > And I prefer running a modern Linux or Unix natively on my system :). > Virtualbox is a nice option for Windows users when it works though. > > Of course, from the developers point of view, no matter how nice we > set up our own environment of choice, the issue remains that we don't > want to require users to have to upgrade Windows Ultimate to compile/ > run our code.
It's not only Windows Ultimate -- it is also e.g. Windows 7 enterprise, which e.g. my entire university and its employees will soon have access to. There's a lot of users on Windows Enterprise. If something was my software which I had a hard time porting to Windows, I wouldn't hesitate to embrace SUA as a first solution, rather than spending many times more time going native or with Cygwin. (I never tried SUA, but the existance of a Gentoo port speaks volumes I think.) Dag Sverre _______________________________________________ Cython-dev mailing list [email protected] http://codespeak.net/mailman/listinfo/cython-dev
