On 08/23/2010 02:33 PM, Michael Haubenwallner wrote:
> 
> 
[snip]

just out of curiosity, i installed a current cygwin on a server 2003r2
today, and played around a little (as i remembered it being rather
unstable). i wanted to re-make up my opinion about it, in regards of it
being suitable to run gentoo prefix (or anything else...).

i tried ./configuring a rather simple package (parity [1]). first i
forgot to set a variable, and configure stopped - nothing wrong with
that. but a simple "export var=blah; <up> <up> <return>" made the sh.exe
called by configure core 6 or 7 times in a row, way up in configure,
during checking the printf/echo semantics of the system. that not only
messed up the console output, but of course gave wrong configure
results, as the checks erroneously went wrong.

so... to summarize that: for me, cygwin is absolutely unusable for
anything serious. i know interix is only on enterprise systems, but
that's the price you'll have to pay to get something that _works_.
cygwin does certainly not. sad. i feel that our decision to take the
interix route was the right one. there's not a perfect world there
either, but it's all problems that i can overcome (see my recently
created suacomp library [2], which fixes nearly all of them).

I'm really curious if I'm the only person in the world that keeps having
such problems (on fresh & clean systems!). how the heck can people
develop software on cygwin if it crashes constantly, randomly, and
unreproducible.

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/parity/
[2] http://sourceforge.net/p/suacomp/git/?branch=master

just my 2 cents. :)
regards, markus