cgf, I've been using cygwin off and on for ~14 years and I'm aware what
it is and is not. Getting defensive and huffy over a rhetorical (not
technical/internal) comparison of cygwin to other "collections of tools
which provide [with varying completeness] a Linux look and feel
environment for Windows" isn't productive. Nor is making unwarranted
assumptions about my ignorance.
On my own primary machine I've always had a more complete cygwin install
and been glad to be able to, among other things, use the full toolchain
to build plenty of software that would not have worked with msys/mingw
or whatever. But on my other machines, or for other people, I have
frequently installed a fairly minimal cygwin environment. Much of the
use these installs have seen would have been adequately met by many of
the "bundle of win32 binaries" offerings which include a shell. Often,
however, that wouldn't suffice due to compatibility gotchas or to a
missing tool. In such a situation cygwin is doing quite a similar task
to what these bundles are intended to do, it's just doing it better and
more completely; the internal differences are not particularly relevant
to the user. Hence the 'on steroids.' Almost all of the other people I
know who use cygwin use it exclusively in this way. Not everybody wants
the full build toolchain, every scripting language under the sun, etc.
"Being more like linux" is not a well-defined goal, and it cannot
provide any useful guidance in making decisions like this, since for any
optional dependency you can find distributions which went either way.
Plenty of minimalist distributions out there, and the popularity of
different approaches has fluctuated over the years. (Remember when
gentoo and USE flags were all the rage?)
"Being more like the latest Fedora" or the like would be well-defined
and give concrete guidance, but I can't think of any reason why it would
be a reliably good match for your goals for the project or for users' needs.
I really appreciate your leadership and all the work you and others have
done over the years. I am not here to bicker. You folks have to make
tradeoffs and decisions in trying to meet competing goals and disparate
users' needs with limited resources, and of course minimalists' concerns
won't always win out. Even in this case with vim, where providing for
both the minimal and the full-fat is quite possible and is a route taken
by many distros, spending effort on that may not be the right use of
cygwin resources. I don't pretend to know. But I do think that folks are
unnecessarily dismissive of this type of concern. Rick's concern really
is relevant, and the decisions and tradeoffs can be made without being
dismissive.
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