What baffles me is, why didn't MS just arrange to support Cygwin more directly, e.g., make a "blessed" distribution mechanism for Cygwin available to their users? Surely this could have been worked out: they have some sort of "partnership" with RedHat, they claim.
I put a lengthy comment to that effect in the forum associated with that video, after a colleague who was at the "Build Conference" in SF emailed it to me last week. (There may be more than one video.) I do not think they have really considered the integration issues that Cygwin has mostly solved. Not just permissions, but small things like cygpath and such utilities. No doubt they can, but will they stick to it long enough to make everything work? I have my doubts. Remember, they have tried basically the same thing at least twice before: the "POSIX Subsystem" of WinNT, and the "Unix Tools for Windows". Both failed and have been abandoned. And PowerShell is sort of another try: do you all know that they started from the old ksh sources, somehow? But they totally screwed up PS, from my point of view, by making it deal primarily with binary streams of proprietary data instead of text. That may make it better for a former CMD.EXE user, but it does not integrate at all with anything else. For instance, trying to pipe PS output into a bash script, or vice versa, is a nightmare. I have given up. At the end of the day, mass Windows users just don't get the whole idea of a shell as an integrator of software tools. They think it is supposed to make pretty pictures in a console emulator, as a poor substitute for a GUI. I suspect that will lead MS to screw up their Unix environment, to make it more friendly to their primary user base. Which will make it useless to me. I could be wrong. I'll give it a year or two to settle, and then give it a try. I just hope it does not interfere too much with my Cygwin setup, which I expect to keep for the foreseeable future. --- Karl Botts, kdbo...@usa.net -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
