On Tue, 30 Sep 2003 14:42:34 +0100, "Marsland, John"
<John.Marsland@CommerzbankIB.com> wrote :
My understanding is that MSYS was designed to provide a Minimal SYStem to
complement the Minimal GNU tools. So you can run the ./configure on windows
just the same as any unix variant and make as normal. I understand it uses
native libraries rather then the cygwin.dll .. so should be faster???
Just to clarify: currently R doesn't use cygwin.dll, just some of the
tools in the toolset for building R do. So I doubt if there would be
a big speedup if any, but it might simplify things. You can currently
run ./configure on Windows, it just doesn't produce a configuration
that works :-(. Fixing this is one of my projects for the next
release.
This would completely remove the need for separate windows project (except
for any platform specific devices eg graphics, GUIs etc ... MSYS provides
extensions for the win32 API also) - in exactly the same way and the new Mac
osX/fink build works.
Essentially the main current need for separate windows code is the
device support and the GUI. There is a bit more than that (e.g.
separate makefiles), which are basically remnants of the days when the
toolset was less capable. There are also some things which can be
handled by #ifdef's in the standard code (e.g. loading dynamic
libraries).
I will take a look at Msys after the 1.8.0 release.
Duncan Murdoch