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Arjen Markus wrote:
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<pre wrap="">Arjen Markus wrote:
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<pre wrap=""><!---->
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<pre wrap="">Don't forget all those PCs with Windows installed but no Cygwin or
MingW: they simply can not use the configure scripts. Of course, one
can require these users to install Cygwin or MingW, but what is that
different from installing CMake?
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<pre wrap="">The level of pain. Cygwin is easy. It just takes a lot more MB of
downloads to have a working system, than to grab CMake. Or, uh, you
can grab the CMake that's in Cygwin. :-)
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Hm, I was thinking more of the end-users than developers :).
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Only Unix people think that "end users" run ./configure scripts or
CMake. In the Windows world, if you're running a compiler, you're a
developer. You may be a developer who wants a painless build, but
you're still a developer. The answer for an end user is CPack, not
CMake. Even for most Unix developers, the answer is a modern packaging
system. Only weenies want to sit around building huge stacks of
libraries all day long.<br>
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<pre wrap="">MinGW / MSYS has become *awful* if you're trying to get Autoconf going.
I spent an entire day on it recently and almost gave up. The only
thing that saved my ass was a rogue 3rd party project called
mingw-install. <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-install">http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-install</a> It
*nukes* the whole MSYS mess and puts in a bunch of stuff that actually
works, with the most current versions of Autoconf and whatnot.
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Thanks for the tip! I have never been able to grasp the information
on the home page - what packages I need etc. A simple receipe would
have done: "if you are a typical user/developer, get this and this."
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Being similarly befuddled, I read the archives about this. It seems
that at least one of the MSYS leads simply doesn't care, and won't be
lifting fingers for Autoconf. Which boggles me, since I always thought
the point of MSYS was to be able to run Autoconf, but I guess that's
not so. I don't know what people are doing with MSYS if not using it
to build GNU-ish stuff. Pretty little shell? Geez, who cares? The
MSYS guys definitely don't think they're supposed to be a fullblown
Unix-under-Windows like Cygwin, they think they're supposed to be a
Minimal SYStem. They won't do anything which pulls them in the
direction of being like Cygwin. So, what *do* they want to do? I
think there's a problem of cultural definition afoot. Maybe if I
lurked on their mailing list long enough, I'd figure it out and be
capable of uttering the right magic words.<br>
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Cheers,<br>
Brandon Van Every<br>
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