On 10/31/21 7:06 PM, Jason Pyeron wrote:
-----Original Message-----
From: Brian Inglis
Sent: Sunday, October 31, 2021 11:23 AM
Perhaps someone could explain why Cygwin maintains, builds, and
distributes Mingw tools and libraries, instead of that being done by the
Mingw project(s) about which I know little?
As we will be dropping Windows versions and 32 bit support in future
releases, should we also be looking at dropping the Mingw packages we
maintain, build, and distribute, but do not appear to use, except for
building other Mingw packages?
Supporting the two Mingw variations on packages sometimes takes as much
work as the Cygwin packages, as parts of the toolchains and libraries
may have different versions and dependencies.
I basically build, check, and distribute those, but know little about
using them to check they work, so no idea whether they work or not.
I have had little success in getting the Mingw dual arch build process
working to any useful extent, and no response to questions about that,
which I may have buried at the end of my other verbiage on this list.
Kyle,
Thoughts?
Being a GCC toolchain, MinGW *could* distribute binaries built with
MinGW itself (such that they do not depend in Cygwin or MSYS). However,
MinGW doesn't have a package manager that would allow developers to
easily add development libraries besides the usual msvcrt symbol stubs
and libstdc++ or whatever, so I wouldn't necessarily say that they
*should* distribute binaries themselves.
On the 32-bit support issue: regardless of Cygwin dropping support for
32-bit, and regardless of Cygwin's own use of MinGW to build setup.exe
(as Achim pointed out), MinGW is used as a cross-compiler for developers
to target 32-bit non-Cygwin platforms. There is value in Cygwin being
useful on modern machines as a development environment to target older
platforms, even if Cygwin itself won't run on older platforms. Obviously
this might be a minority use case and Cygwin is a volunteer project, so
it would be understandable if the 32-bit cross compiler packages went
away due to a lack of volunteer interest. I hope this doesn't happen,
because it is not really fun to compile our own cross-compilers.
I am not a Cygwin package maintainer, so I have no opinions regarding
package maintenance.
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