Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin • Hacker News Board

Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#41

Post by baronfel » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 6:11 AM UTC

tikhonj wrote: post #15

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.

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…

Are you perhaps thinking about the CoApp project? It's making some decent progess, check out CoApp.org for updates. Last I heard they were in the process of shallow-forking a slew of OSS projects and building them natively in Windows.

Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#42

Post by Dylan16807 » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 6:29 AM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #16

swah wrote: post #5

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

Or even andLinux [1], which gives you "a complete Ubuntu Linux system running seamlessly in Windows". [1]: http://www.andlinux.org/

*32-bit only

Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#43

Post by william42 » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 6:42 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

  william@aldebaran ~ $ ed
  bash: ed: command not found

Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#44

Post by keshet » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 7:07 AM UTC

No awk? I'm outta here.

Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#45

Post by ComputerGuru » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 7:25 AM UTC

malkia wrote: post #32

Cygwin is not perfect, but he's the thing that I prefer over other options. It's unix emulator layer, and as such tries it's best to emulate fork() - which the other alternatives does not even think to put in. VM is not a real alternative, as there is actually more work to be done to plumb source A with tools B from the VM. I don't use cygwin from bash, but rather start it directly from the FAR manager (console based…

Regarding symlinks on Windows:

http://neosmart.net/blog/2006/vista-symlinks-revisited/

And an open source (MIT) binary-compatible implementation of ln for Windows Vista+ using native WIN32 APIs:

http://neosmart.net/blog/2011/open-source-100-compatible-ln-...

disclosure: my site

Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#46

Post by ComputerGuru » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 7:29 AM UTC

charliesome wrote: post #31

atambo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

MSYS is just as native as Cygwin

Not true. MSYS is mainly wrappers around existing, native WIN32/MSVCRT function calls.

Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#47

Post by xfs » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 7:36 AM UTC

william42 wrote: post #43

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

william@aldebaran ~ $ ed bash: ed: command not found

Here is the joke: http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.html

Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#48

Post by markokocic » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 8:16 AM UTC

I understand why someone wouldn't like to use cygwin, but why new project?

MSYS/mingw-get are active projects that provide a good base to build upon. Why not helping improve it? Unix tools on Windows is niche enough so that choice only leads to fragmentation, not competition.

Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#49

Post by andrewf » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 8:23 AM UTC

guan wrote: post #3

Is there an SSH server for Windows that will work with this?

KpyM seems to do a decent job of providing SSH access to a cmd.exe prompt (and anything you care to run from one). It's free although the provided binaries do an annoying nagware thing on login. I've been using it for SCP access to Windows servers.

http://www.kpym.com/2/kpym/index.htm

Re: Gow – The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#50

Post by vog » Mon, Dec 05, 2011, 8:38 AM UTC

markokocic wrote: post #48

I understand why someone wouldn't like to use cygwin, but why new project? MSYS/mingw-get are active projects that provide a good base to build upon. Why not helping improve it? Unix tools on Windows is niche enough so that choice only leads to fragmentation, not competition.

This is exactly what I also thought when I read the headline. And this becomes even more strange given that they are almost certainly building upon using MinGW.