Windows have many atlernative: Cygwin, MSYS2, WSL and Native. We need
select one(less setup, more stable and community favor) to avoid the
user lose the focus. It will be great if the selected platform can
build and test on Linux/macOS/WIndows.
Regarding Windows, I think Native is the best for a 10-minute
quickstart, because it does not require installing a big
UNIX-compatibility layer? I don't know the details because I build on
Linux.
I would not recommend Windows Native unless you are willing to invest
some significant amount of time (and in that case you would have my full
support and I would also help). But there are a couple of misconceptions:
As you know, most build system updates are made by Linux users that
those have broken the Windows Native build. There was a suggestion to
remove the Windows Native build a couple of months back. That was
controversial so we actually voted: Should we keep the broken Windows
native build (assuming that someone will fix it someday)? Or remove it
all together? The overwhelming overwhelming result was to keep it even
in its broken state.
We did, however, mark the Windows native build configuration as
EXPERIMENTAL so it cannot be selected accidentally.
A second misconception is that it requires installation of less
software. That is not true either. While is does not not require a
complete POSIX compatibility layer like Cygwin or MSYS2, it does require
the availability of serveral POSIX tools. In the native build those
are provided through GNUWin32 which is a collection of (old) GNU tools
that build natively on windows. This provides us with GNU make and the
other GNU utilities that run as plane Windows exe file with no special
context or libraries.
However, from a user point of view, there is not so much difference.
GNUWin32 probably takes more time to install than MYSY2 (but a lot less
than Cygwin). The only real difference from the user point of view is
that you have to use the COM.exe shell or PowerShell. I prefer to use
the COM.exe in the ConEMU terminal because ConEMU is more Linux-like.
