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Re: Mozilla 1.3 built on cygwin?


Michael,

At 21:32 2003-03-26, Michael F. March wrote:
Jeff,

Just outta' curiosity, beyond the satisfaction of accomplishing it, what would be gained?

well you could ssh into your windows machine and run mozilla remotely from your xterminal ...
umm - okay so thats not much of a gain... but...

First off, I have said it before and I'll say it again, Evolution from Ximian needs to be ported to Cygwin..

Anyway..

There would be A LOT to be gained from having a Cygwin port of Mozilla.

    1. You could easily hack on features the Windows and Unix source
        trees if Mozilla ran via Cygwin. Also, you could build Mozilla
        on Windows without having to use any MSFT products.

OK. Whatever those are.


I'm guessing the MS in MSFT is Microsoft. I don't know what the FT part is.

Building from Cygwin while targeting native Windows APIs would presumably be feasible using MinGW and / or "-mno-cygwin", but the result would presumably function just as Mozilla compiled with Visual Studio.


    2. Having a complex GUI app like Mozilla ported to Cygwin could
        prove to be a stick in which to measure and compare the over
        all efficiency and performance of Cygwin. If the "native"
        Mozilla and the Cygwin version performed reasonably the same,
        then we would know that Cygwin is on track. If the Cygwin
        version lagged, it would set concrete goals for the
        Cygwin/XFree team.

That's not going to happen any time soon. XFree86/Cygwin has no graphics acceleration. Apart from that, little if anything runs as fast through Cygwin as it does on the Win32 API even if GUI operation is ignored or irrelevant.


I don't mean this as a criticism, but just a fact. I imagine the biggest win would be by getting some graphics acceleration in XFree86.


    3. I hate where and how Mozilla puts user files under native
        Windows. The Cygwin port would be better... more like the Linux
        port.

OK, but that's pretty minor in my book.



    4. Don't underestimate how great it would be to be able to
        X in an check your email. Better yet, be able to run more
        than one user at a time be able to X in and check their
        email.

If I was willing to use Mozilla for mail, that might be valid. Now KMail, that I'd use.



As a long time Windows Mozilla user, I would welcome a Cygwin version
with open arms.

Open arms... Hmmm... "Embrace Open Source."



Finally.. Every major porting effort that Cygwin goes to does not
kill or hurt Cygwin, it makes it stronger and more functional.

Unquantifiable.


It's clear that bringing otherwise unavailable software to Windows via Cygwin is an unqualified win.

However, doing so for software already available on Windows, especially when it's not software that integrates with other Cygwin components, adds rather less. Take Perl, for example. There's a native Windows port and a Cygwin port. But Cygwin Perl is still a win because any Perl program can be run in a context of close interaction (pipelines, scripts, uniform pathname treatment, etc.) with other Cygwin programs.

From this perspective, I'd say Cygwin Mozilla would be a rather small win. GUI-intensive, non-scriptable applications for X (which does not itself run unless the Windows GUI system is running beneath it) add rather little when those applications are already available as native Windows programs.

And that old saw about "what doesn't kill me ..." is BS, though I imagine it's also largely irrelevant when applied to software.


--

<march>

Michael F. March


Randall Schulz


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