For a variety of reasons discussed below I think it is time (unless someone strongly objects) for us to deprecate the MinGW/MSYS in favour of MinGW-w64/MSYS2 and other Windows alternatives.
One advantage MinGW/MSYS can still claim is libraries such as PLplot built on that platform are native Windows libraries and do not depend on any special dll such as the Cygwin dll that is a required dependency for all software built on Cygwin. But that advantage is no longer unique to MinGW/MSYS because MinGW-w64/MSYS2 (a completely independent project with different developers than the ones who are still supporting MinGW/MSYS) shares that same advantage. I have always had something of a negative view of the MinGW/MSYS platform because it provided few of the PLplot soft prerequisite libraries. This substantial constraint has historically made PLplot extremely limited on MinGW/MSYS with none of our best device drivers available as a result. That is a big contrast with both the Cygwin and MinGW-w64/MSYS2 platforms which supply essentially all PLplot soft prerequisites making PLplot extremely powerful on those platforms. Furthermore, I just plain don't like the MinGW/MSYS lack of quality control on the packages they build. The recent egregious example of this (which was the motivation of this e-mail) is the gcc-4.9.3 release for MinGW/MSYS. According to the release announcement by Keith Marshall (who no longer uses Windows (!), but instead has created this version using cross-compilation) this is an experimental version that does not support either Posix threads or Ada due to other long-standing issues with MinGW/MSYS. However, despite these "experimental" caveats this is the version MinGW/MSYS users automatically download if they update their system, and as a result complaints are beginning to trickle in about gcc no longer working on this platform! According to <https://sourceforge.net/p/msys2/wiki/MSYS2%20introduction> "MSYS2 is an independent rewrite of MSYS, based on modern Cygwin (POSIX compatibility layer) and MinGW-w64 with the aim of better interoperability with native Windows software." >From Greg's good comprehensive test results on the MinGW-w64/MSYS2 platform, I think the MSYS2 developers have fulfilled this promise, and meanwhile there continue to be the packaging issues like the one I mentioned above for gcc on MinGW/MSYS. Thus, it appears that MinGW-w64/MSYS2 does a _much_ better job of implementing the original idea behind MinGW/MSYS than MinGW/MSYS currently does, and it is therefore time to deprecate the latter platform. As a result I plan to ignore MinGW/MSYS and emphasize only MinGW-w64/MSYS2, Cygwin, and MSVC when calling for comprehensive testing of Windows platforms from now on. And from time to time I will likely put some "deprecated" qualifiers into our wiki for pages that discuss PLplot on the MinGW/MSYS platform. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Site24x7 APM Insight: Get Deep Visibility into Application Performance APM + Mobile APM + RUM: Monitor 3 App instances at just $35/Month Monitor end-to-end web transactions and take corrective actions now Troubleshoot faster and improve end-user experience. Signup Now! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=272487151&iu=/4140 _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
