Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gow - The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

1–10 of 19 posts

Re: Gow - The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#3

Post by runjake »

This is a junk submission. Where to start? This project hasn't shown activity in 10 months.

Furthermore, the project is largely written in VBScript and batch files, which is insanity, even according to Microsoft themselves.

It was time to move to Powershell a long, long time ago. You even have solid projects like NuGet to jump off from for code and design. I can't take a project seriously when it's written in VBScript because so many of its constructs are shoddy.

But again, those last two paragraphs are meant as advice for living projects, which this one is not.

Re: Gow - The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#4

Post by mkl »

runjake wrote: post #3

This is a junk submission. Where to start? This project hasn't shown activity in 10 months. Furthermore, the project is largely written in VBScript and batch files, which is insanity, even according to Microsoft themselves. It was time to move to Powershell a long, long time ago. You even have solid projects like NuGet to jump off from for code and design. I can't take a project seriously when it's written in VBScrip…

Plus it's been submitted multiple times in the last few months already: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3312009, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4085022

Re: Gow - The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#6

Post by kayoone »

runjake wrote: post #3

This is a junk submission. Where to start? This project hasn't shown activity in 10 months. Furthermore, the project is largely written in VBScript and batch files, which is insanity, even according to Microsoft themselves. It was time to move to Powershell a long, long time ago. You even have solid projects like NuGet to jump off from for code and design. I can't take a project seriously when it's written in VBScrip…

0.6.0 seems to have been released in the last 24 hours. You are probably right with the rest though

Re: Gow - The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#7

Post by willvarfar »

The bigger purpose of cygwin is to be able to compile your unix c/c++ to run on Windows. The shell utils is a small part of it, and better covered by things like UnxUtils and the various sets of binaries of the actual unix shell utils that people have packaged already.

Re: Gow - The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#8

Post by geofft »

Apparently, since last time I looked, there's actually source code. It's a tarball containing a collection of zip files of different layouts, with no documentation of how to actually build things, some build trees, etc. Many of the packages in that tarball are years out of date.

It's not a project that anyone else can reasonably use and build on -- it would be easier just to replicate the work. (Which I would like to do, incidentally.)

Re: Gow - The lightweight alternative to Cygwin

#10

Post by dmboyd »

runjake wrote: post #3

This is a junk submission. Where to start? This project hasn't shown activity in 10 months. Furthermore, the project is largely written in VBScript and batch files, which is insanity, even according to Microsoft themselves. It was time to move to Powershell a long, long time ago. You even have solid projects like NuGet to jump off from for code and design. I can't take a project seriously when it's written in VBScrip…

Giving the guy a break, it does look like he doesn't "get" github, as it hosts the sources(not in an easily buildable format) as a binary download. and the content of the repo is just random batch files.

And, regarding batch files, if it gets the job done (i.e. M4 autoconf scripts). What would powershell give you?

Post reply on HN