Christopher Faylor wrote: > I don't know that and a search of the debian site for the word "mingw" > does not unearth any hits.
Debian's package search page is not always that great. But they do provide three packages (mingw32, mingw32-binutils, and mingw32-runtime) which together form a linux-hosted, windows-targeted cross compiler. But these are of course native binaries, and debian does not (AFAIK) distribute any actual target libraries or binaries for this toolchain. So in this case Debian essentially mirrors Cygwin exactly: we both include the cross compiler and runtime, but no target libraries -- except for bzip2 and zlib in the case of Cygwin since these are needed to build parts of Cygwin itself. But that aside, I still agree that mingw libraries do not belong on the Cygwin mirrors. If taken to its logical conclusion the situation is absurd: Two completely separate and independant versions of each library, each tool, etc. That would just be ridiculous, especially considering the confusion it would cause and the fact that unless you're in a specific niche most of those mingw- packages would just be useless and confusing to you. (And it is a "specific niche" because many developers that use mingw do so without Cygwin, either by using mingw directly with an IDE like DevCpp or with MSYS.) That is not to say that the work that Peter has done is not useful -- although this business about "nobody needs/wants shared libraries under mingw" is complete bunk. All he needs to do is create the required setup.ini using genini, and then tell people that need his packages to just paste his URL into setup.exe. Everybody wins. He can even setup a short web page explaining this, which will show up for googlers. Alternatively, he could package and make them avilable on the mingw site, which has it's own kind of packaging system called mingwPORT. I don't think anyone is saying that these packages wouldn't be useful, it's just that they don't belong *here*. Brian
