Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin • Hacker News Board

Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#21

Post by MatthewPhillips » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 3:38 AM UTC

charliesome wrote: post #9

swah wrote: post #5

What is the use case for Cygwin in the days of virtualbox/vmware?

Git

That's available on Windows natively.

Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#22

Post by charliesome » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 3:42 AM UTC

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #21

charliesome wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Git

That's available on Windows natively.

Really? I wasn't aware... since when?

Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#23

Post by joshu » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 3:48 AM UTC

ez77 wrote: post #13

Oh, heretics! How dare they leave ed out of the list [1]? [1] https://github.com/bmatzelle/gow/wiki/executables_list

ED IS THE STANDARD UNIX EDITOR! IT MAKES THE SUN SHINE AND THE SKY BLUE AND THE GRASS GREEN!

Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#24

Post by atambo » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 3:52 AM UTC

charliesome wrote: post #22

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's available on Windows natively.

Really? I wasn't aware... since when?

http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/

Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#25

Post by daemin » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 3:58 AM UTC

Well for a far more light weight solution there's GnuWin32 and GetGnuWin32 (which installs GnuWin32), both available via an easy Internet search. They both run from the command prompt and you don't need any other environment for them.

Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#26

Post by Niten » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 3:58 AM UTC

xpaulbettsx wrote: post #4

We really need to port Homebrew to Windows so that projects like this can be the base, but people can pull in packages on top of it, like a lightweight Cygwin but more Windows'y.

pkgsrc already supports Windows Services for Unix, it may well work on top of this too (though I haven't looked at Gow yet and I honestly have no idea how it differs from MSYS).

But when I think "Unix-like core plus package management on Windows"... well, Cygwin is already there.

Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#27

Post by msluyter » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 4:05 AM UTC

swah wrote: post #5

What is the use case for Cygwin in the days of virtualbox/vmware?

I work at a company that currently provides a 32bit version of Windows 7 (the reasons are somewhat unclear.) But the bottom line is that we have the 3gb max addressable memory problem. When I have eclipse, outlook, chrome, various other dev tools and whatnot open, I'm often near the limit, and adding VMWare player or whatnot would probably be too much. So that's one reason... Plus, I find switching back and forth between a vm and the host OS still somewhat slow/clumsy.

(Yes, I know I should get a new job...)

I like the idea of Gow. Anyone know if you can achieve middle mouse button pasting as when you have X11 under cygwin?

Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#28

Post by nupark2 » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 4:05 AM UTC

swah wrote: post #5

What is the use case for Cygwin in the days of virtualbox/vmware?

I'm a UNIX and Mac OS X transplant using Windows for embedded hardware development (almost all the tools are Windows-only).

I need a terminal from which I can operate on my Windows file system, but running an entire virtual machine is enormous performance-impacting overkill.

Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#29

Post by timtadh » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 4:08 AM UTC

charliesome wrote: post #22

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's available on Windows natively.

Really? I wasn't aware... since when?

Prior to Fall 2007 when I started using Git on windows.

Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#30

Post by nupark2 » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 4:09 AM UTC

natesm wrote: post #18

tikhonj wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does porting Homebrew make any more sense than porting something from Linux (for example)? My impression is that the Mac OS ones aren't as good. A package manager really sounds like the sort of project where the incompatibilities between *nix and Windows are large enough that writing a new one would make more sense. I think there are even existing projects like that for Windows; I remember seeing one on HN a while ba…

The advantage of Homebrew is that it is modern, small, and simple. Obviously apt is better, but apt also requires that you maintain a large repository of binaries. Homebrew is slow[1], but because it builds from source it is trivial to create a new package. Homebrew packages are just Ruby files. If the project uses Autotools, all you generally need to do is enter the URL, an md5, and the dependencies, then it Just Wo…

Everything you just said (packages are files, simple, uses existing tools for self update) applies to MacPorts too. The only real differences seem to be the use of Ruby, and an attempt to avoid replacing OS dependencies -- even if the replacements are newer.

In fact, MacPorts actually supports generating Debian packages and an apt repository straight from its port files.

As for Windows, Cygwin already provides binaries. An apt repository of them would be great. I'm not convinced porting homebrew or MacPorts makes sense, however -- they're both fairly Mac-focused.