On 08/24/2010 03:52 PM, Al wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>>
> 
> Great!
> 
> You are the fist one, who comes up with stability warnings towards
> Cygwin, after I am trying for 3 days to get it running with Prefix.
> Checkings are really slow, feels like 1995.

hehe, i had to check again, before ranting against cygwin - it could
have gotten better - sadly enough it hasn't.

> 
> I tried to collect informations about Cygwin before. Wikipedia writes
> they use it, to compile Sun Java and OpenOffic. That is serious
> software. Isn't it?

yep, that's serious. but there are always serious peaces of software
(eclipse is a good example here), where i can only bang my head against
the nearest wall, when i see what they're doing ;)

you cannot know, _how_ exactly they use cygwin. i can imagine somebody
sitting there once each month trying to get a openoffice build through -
that person knows that cygwin is unstable and simply tries as often as
is required to get the build through - simple restart each command until
it works.

my (our companies) use case is a different one: we need a _really_
stable environment, as we long to do nightly builds of software which
consists of literally billions of lines of code. the build takes hours
on really fast machines, and we can't be watching windows all the time
like "owh - it stopped again after building 10 hours. let's restart."
(excuse the "10 hours", but windows _is_ slow ;)).

> 
> Now what?
> 
> I still believe that the majority of my target group would not spend
> extra money only to feed microsoft. Switching to interix would
> drastically reduce the group of potential users. Still it may be the
> better decision as a large group of frustrated users is nothing good
> itself.

hm. that's the good old question whom we're targeting. i personally
target businesses longing to have a stable environment to build their
software (us :)). so there is a clear no-go for instabilities of any
kind. (that's why i'm fixing all those annoying interix issues one after
the other. i admit it's a slow process, and interix prefix (the upstream
one at least) is not really usable at the moment, but hey - i'm rather
alone on the windows side).

> 
> Guess I spend another day testing Cygwin, to find out how far the
> instabilities really matter.

yeah, sure - are you seeing any instabilities yet?

markus

> 
> Al
>