On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 03:51:17AM +0100, Keith Marshall wrote:
> On Thursday 05 May 2005 7:40 pm, Zvezdan Petkovic wrote:
> > BTW, I don't think Cygwin should be a measure of Unix compatibility.
>
> Possibly not; but, like it or not, Microsoft Windows has the largest user
> base of any OS on the planet. For those of us who are forced, out of
> corporate necessity rather than personal choice, to use it, Cygwin is
> probably the most widely used UNIX emulator, allowing us to use our preferred
> UNIXy tools on an alien platform. You may not consider it a measure of UNIX
> compatibility, but you certainly can't ignore it as a measure of portability.
I am absolutely aware of that.
Unfortunately, in terms of Unix compatibility Cygwin assumes too many
things as if it's running on a Linux box.
In those terms Microsoft SFU (Services for Unix) and UWIN from AT&T
(David Korn) are much more Unix than Cygwin.
That's what I meant.
I am also aware that much more people use Cygwin than SFU or UWIN,
but we could also say that much more people uses Linux than Solaris,
which doesn't mean that Linux is a better measure of POSIX conformance.
If you are going to ensure that groff runs on Cygwin, I do not see a
reason why you wouldn't ensure that it runs under SFU.
Exactly because of the corporate requirements, someone's boss may be
much more comfortable with the (free) download of a software from
Microsoft, supported by Microsoft, on the corporate machines.
I'm using groff for Windows on my office machine, and I have a VMware
with a whole virtual network of virtual Linux and BSD machines, so I
didn't feel a need to install Cygwin. Other machine in my office is an
HP-UX workstation. At home I run only Linux and OpenBSD.
However, if there's nobody else to do it, I wouldn't mind installing SFU
on my office machine and from time to time compiling groff under it.
Regards,
Zvezdan Petkovic
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