Dave, it makes no sense to compare cygwin and virtualbox by Googlehits. Cygwin is just a tool to port Unix software to Windows quickly and relatively painlessly (at least the "command-line" software can usually be ported pretty quickly). Cygwin is also a toolchain to develop software on Windows (i.e. it has compilers, etc).
Virtualbox is an emulator to run other operating systems (e.g. Linux atop WIndows, or the other way aroung). So you can just run a Linux program in your Windows box, unamended. Also, note that many parts of Sage are not developed by Sage developers, e.g. Maxima, GAP. There is little chance that these parts would be ported to Windows natively (on the other hand, e.g., GAP has a Cygwin port, that is well-supported etc). I toyed with making a native port of GAP to Windows some ten years ago. It was a highly non-trivial task that would have taken me months back then (and then I was relatively well-versed in Windows programming). So a "native" port of Sage would still settle for Cygwin ports of some of its modules. Dmitrii 2010/1/2 Dr. David Kirkby <david.kir...@onetel.net>: > William Stein wrote: > >>> But that is very different from a native Windows port, which was I thought >>> we >>> were talking about. >> >> We are talking about porting Sage to windows. I will leave it to the >> lawyers to define "native Windows port". > > Fair enough. > >> I strongly disagree with your assertion that Cygwin would be vastly >> inferior to VirtualBox for Windows users. How much have you used >> VirtualBox or Cygwin? I've used both for hundreds of hours, and I've >> also listened to and watched tons of Windows users. Sage built >> using Cygwin would be vastly better for most Windows users than >> VirtualBox. >> >> -- William > > I've not used either very much, but of the two, I much prefer VirtualBox. > Personally I was never over impressed with Cygwin, but I find Virtualbox very > impressive. > > FWIW, a Google on Cywin brings up 4.8 million hits. On VirtualBox 4.2 million > hits. Considering Cywin was released in 1995 and VirtualBox in 2007, it would > suggest to me its a more popular tool today. > > dave > -- To post to this group, send email to sage-support@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-support+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URL: http://www.sagemath.org
