Whether you like it or not, most developers use Windows.
I'm not really sure if this is even a true statement to begin with -- and it's definitely becoming less true every day. Are you talking palm developers? C/C++ developers, or just "developers! developers! developers!" ?
WRT your other question "why require cygwin?"... I bet it's something like "cygwin's the easiest way to get prc-tools to run on windows".
A cygwin installation can be as small or large as you like it. In its smallest form, it's merely the cygwin dll and whatever tools you need to run. for prc-tools, that's probably the m68k-* and arm-* tool-set, and make. not large at all -- you shouldn't even need the cygwin bash shell (though it's much better than the default windows shell, for sure). Even if the entire set of cygwin development tools was installed, it'd still be smaller than the smallest possible VS.net installation, so don't get yourself too worked up. Anyway, coupled with an IDE (like it sounds like it's gonna be) you probably won't even notice the command-line/makefile stuff going on below the surface.
And regarding your assertion that using cygwin will turn people off PalmOS development, I hardly think so. The standard Sony PS2 dev system is based on gcc/makefiles and cygwin tools (if you're developing on a windows machine -- you don't need cygwin if you're developing on linux, of course...) and I see no developers flocking away from that platform... well, at least until PS3 is released... ;)
I, for one, develop exclusively for PalmOS rather than PocketPC because PalmOS gives me a choice (windows, mac, linux, freebsd, whatever -- vim, emacs, pico, ultra-edit, codewright, etc, etc) in what development environment I use. Allowing the developer to choose their working environment is *not* a bad thing... really.
No such joy in the PocketPC world...
by the way...
I smell a troll.
- Eron
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