[En-Nut-Discussion] NutOS configurator

[Harald Kipp]

Ole Reinhardt schrieb:
> Cygwin is needed for the gcc / make environment anyway. Kconfig is a
> modified version of dialog, which itself depends on ncurses. But ncurses
> should be available for windows as well.
>
>   
I'm probably getting somewhat off-topic now.

ncurses is probably available for Windows. But I didn't install Cygwin 
on my current Windows workstation, don't want to and did not need so 
far. IMO, Cygwin is a very good Linux emulator. And its X-Server is one 
of the rare full blown implementations. Everything is nice as long as it 
works. However, there are several things I do not like.

Cygwin forces you to install a large environment, even if you just want 
to use one or two *nix tools..Updates sometimes break something. This 
may happen with any software. However, Cygwin is a large package, 
similar to a small Linux system. Compared to Linux, it has a small user 
base and you often have to spend hours to fix your individual problem 
yourself. Unless you are both, a Windows and Linux Guru, it can 
sometimes drive you crazy.

The biggest problem is the incompatibility among the Cygwin DLL 
versions. When I used Cygwin based programs, I typically had three of 
them available. But all of them come with the same name. Windows doesn't 
allow you to load two different DLLs with the same name. Thus, I had to 
terminate my X-Server if I wanted to run another tool with incompatible 
DLLs and vice versa.

Last not least: Did you ever try to fix a problem in the Cygwin sources 
yourself? Well, I gave up early, because I had been unable to find the 
related source of my installation. I'm sure, it is available, but I 
simply can't find it. May be I'm too stupid. Redhat insists on 
delivering all sources of the Cygwin code with your application. I'm 
aware, that many (all?) Cygwin based applications ignore this, but that 
doesn't mean that it is OK to do so.

The majority (all?) of WinAVR executables do not require Cygwin. YAGARTO 
is completely build with MinGW. Both intentionally try to avoid Cygwin.

I do not consider applications being fully portable, if they require 
emulation layers like Cygwin or MinGW. On the other hand MinGW can save 
a lot of effort when porting from Linux to Windows. But I'd carefully 
think about using Cygwin.


Harald