[CMake] MSYS is a Unix

[Brandon Van Every]

Bill wrote:
>Brandon wrote:
>>
>>Do not confuse MinGW for MSYS.  MinGW is a compiler.  MSYS is
>>an OS environment.
>
>I am not sure I agree.
>
>From the MinGW web page:
>MinGW: A collection of freely available and freely distributable Windows
>specific header files and import libraries combined with GNU toolsets
>that allow one to ***produce native Windows*** programs that do not rely
>on any 3rd-party C runtime DLLs.
>
>MSYS: A Minimal SYStem to provide POSIX/Bourne configure scripts the
>***ability to execute*** and create ***a Makefile used by make***.
>
>It sounds to me like the goal of MSYS is to provide support for making
>MinGW applications that have unix makefiles. I don't think the goal
>of MSYS is to build MSYS applications. It is more of a support
>tool chain to allow easier use of MinGW compilers.

I don't think reading a few sentences on a homepage is a reliable statement
on how MSYS is employed.  I mean, I could present the MSYS documents, detail
the / root filesystem, note that drives are accessed as /c/ /d/ rather than
C:\ D:\, that one uses fstab and mnt, etc.  What really matters is how
people are actually using MSYS, not someone's statement of intent, nor our
various interpretations of intent.  I think feedback from the MSYS user
community would be the most appropriate way to determine whether /usr/local
or C:\Program Files should be the default for MSYS.

>If you want UNIX on windows, you would do cygwin,

That does not follow.  Aside from the fact that MSYS provides perfectly good
Unix tools, and the ability to compile many apps and libraries common in the
Unix world, there is the issue of licensing.  Cygwin usually forces a GPL
license in practice, because most libraries link with cygwin1.dll by
default.  Open source Unix libraries tend to be deeply stacked and it's
usually not feasible to recompile everything in order to purge the
licensing.  Not to mention that nobody actually does this so it's never
really tested.

>in which case you would use the cygwin cmake.
>
>At one point I tried to build a msys cmake, but there is not really
>enough support to build the
>curses interface to cmake in msys like we do with cmake.
>So, I think the default for MSYS install path should be
>C:/Program Files.
>-Bill

I am away from my build computer at present.  After the holidays, I will try
to build CMake in a recent MinGW / MSYS environment.  If a MSYS-specific
version proves easy enough, does that diminish your objections to
/usr/local?


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every
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