If you don't have cygwin, how will you checkout the CVS module?? Maybe we could use the script I made that implements the CVS protocol in PHP. :)
erm, against everything I said so far - tortoise works and is far less
unwieldy than cygwin .. it just has one or two areas where it's nice to have
cygwin as a fallback ;)
I have also used tortoise on Windows, and it is cooool :))
And this brings us to the point of replacing the unix tools. You are on windows. You can have several GUI CVS clients (tortoisecvs being one of the easiest possibilities), you can install xsltproc with copying some files to the right place, and you already have PHP.
Now if you are working with the PHP documentation you need to install cygwin with all the tools for these commands:
./configure ... make test
You can do everything else out of the cygwin environment more efficiently than you would do on the command line, but make test is a requirement... So you need all the cygwin tools on your machine for these two commands... You will not build the manual on your machine because it takes a long time to complete and there is no point in it actually just building for yourself...
I would have started this discussion with the suggestion on presenting an alternative on validity checking (make test) for windows users, since this is the only thing which makes cygwin required, but since it would mean the introduction of a complete replacement of the configure process, it would lead to a complete new build system without the unix tools.
It is odd that if you are on windows, you need to have that huge cygwin stuff on your machine just for validity checking. I would not say that it is the right tool for the right job, since the validity of the manual could be checked with some PHP scripts and xsltproc (which is damn easy and damn small to install on windows).
I am a linux user for some time now, though I am not a linux expert, and therefore I am familiar and quite fine with the current tools... I have been using Windows for years when I started working with PHPdoc, and I had a negative experience with cygwin... It is like installing an office kit (OOO or MS Office) just for write a letter to your grandma, and then forget about it... Windows has a program named "Write" which is perfectly suitable for basic word processing, there is no need to an additional tool installed, even if it is as cool as OOO...
Goba
