From: JonY <10...@gm...> - 2009-08-19 06:15:09
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On 8/19/2009 11:51, Varuna Seneviratna wrote: > I am totally new to MSYS.Please help me to clear these misunderstnadings > The mingw.org home page in the description of MSYS says "for porting of > many Open Source applications to the MS-Windows platform" and the MSYS home > page http://mingw.org/wiki/MSYS says "does not give the ability to magically > port UNIX programs over to Windows" at the top second paragraph. What does > this mean.Actually what is MSYS? > > Hi, It means that you can use software that traditionally run on UNIX on Win32, provided that you recompile them in MinGW. For software that rely on UNIX features, you have to manually "port" the software in such a way it only uses functions available on Win32. Hence its not magically made to run on Windows. You can't run shell script directly under Win32 alone because it lacks a shell script interpreter. The MSYS environment is designed as a supporting Unix-like environment for Win32. Note that it is NOT a Unix emulator. Although not essential for MinGW to function, it is typically used to run shell scripts such as "configure" autotool scripts which come with many software packages. The GTK+-2 stack for example, runs perfectly fine on Win32, but to build it, you need to rely on MSYS to run its "configure" check. MinGW will do the actual compile and linking. I hope I cleared your confusion. |