[Mingw-msys] Re: Automatic prerequisite generation

[Earnie B. <ear...@ya...>]

Mike Capp wrote:
> (Replying by email as lists.sourceforge.net seems to be broken at the 
> moment, and this is possibly drifting offtopic for the make-w32 list. By 
> all means post it if you think anybody else would be interested.)
> 
>>> As you doubtless guessed, I think my objections largely stemmed from 
>>> ignorance here. I'd heard that MSYS was purely an interactive shell, 
>>> based on the assumption that you'd always be running 'make' from the 
>>> supplied rxvt terminal, and the docs that came with it mostly 
>>> reinforce that impression. This would make it pretty useless as an 
>>> external tool for an editor. If, as seems to be the case, you can 
>>> also run the sh.exe directly or specify it as the system shell inside 
>>> your makefile, MSYS gets a *lot* more attractive.
>>
>>
>> Please help me correct your confusion.  At what point does the 
>> documentation need improved?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Earnie.
> 
> 
> Specifically:
> 
> In README.rtf, the "STARTING Msys" section reads: "Starting Msys should 
> just be a matter of clicking on the MSYS icon on your desktop or Start 
> menu.  If you have the File Manager window open, you may now click on it 
> and have it start also.  Doing these presents you with a console window 
> within which you may enter commands."
> 
> That's it. There's no mention of sh.exe as a program you can run 
> independently of rxvt. Even if someone noticed it in the /bin directory 
> and ran it out of curiosity, they'd probably conclude they weren't 
> supposed to do that and give up after finding that "nothing worked" 
> (because running sh.exe doesn't execute a profile to put /bin in the 
> path, and typing './ls' isn't obvious to most Windows people). Also no 
> mention of specifying sh.exe as your shell inside a makefile while 
> running make from the Windows shell; I haven't tried this yet and don't 
> know whether it works, but it's not an unreasonable thing to want to do.
> 

Points taken for consideration.

> More generally:
> 
> MSYS is currently being pitched at people coming FROM a *nix background, 
> who already know all this stuff inside out and just want a painless way 
> to do it in Windows. This is a large part of the MinGW user base, but 
> it's only a part. A lot of people, myself included, came to MinGW with 
> little or no *nix experience, because they wanted to see what all the 
> fuss was about GCC/Linux/etc without plunging in at the deep end, or 
> they were fed up with buggy, bloated, nonconformant, overpriced 
> commercial tools. I installed Linux for the first time after using MinGW 
> for a while, because the experience had given me confidence that the GCC 
> toolchain really *was* as good as it was cracked up to be, and makefiles 
> really *weren't* that bad. (And that was after running make through 
> COMMAND.COM on Win98; you can imagine what a pleasant surprise I got 
> running it through bash on Mandrake.)
> 

Yep.  No sooner that you had your coffee in hand it was time to put it 
back down.

> Now, whether or not you want to consciously support this newbie 
> contingent is entirely up to you. They *will* want more hand-holding, 
> and they *will* ask dumb questions, and they *are* less likely to 
> contribute back in the short term, and there are only so many hours in 
> the day.
> 

I think newbie support happens rather well on the mingw-users and 
mingw-msys lists.  I've never seen complaints or rudeness toward newbies.

> But if you do want to attract the Visual Studio refugees, you need to 
> pitch things on the assumption that the reader knows next to nothing 
> about Unix. Take the MSYS writeup on www.mingw.org, for example:
> 

Visual Studio types tend to want an IDE and usually drift toward DEV-C++ 
by http://www.bloodshed.net.  Your points below are well taken.  I shall 
look toward incoporating your suggestion into the current documentation.

> "MSYS: A Minimal SYStem to provide POSIX/Bourne configure scripts the 
> ability to execute and create a Makefile used by make."
> 
> Huh? Okay, POSIX and Bourne I know, but even with a smattering of 
> Linux-literacy I wouldn't recognize a configure script if it broke into 
> my front room and ate all my furniture. And I can already run make. So 
> why do I need MSYS?
> 
> Maybe something along the lines of:
> 
> Because it provides Unix tools (find, sed etc) which are much more 
> powerful than anything available under DOS and interoperate better with 
> gcc and make. No more of that "$(subst /,\,$@)" mess. Makefiles using 
> these tools will also be easier to port to and from *nix.
> 
> These tools generally work pretty well in makefiles even with 
> COMMAND.COM, but they (presumably) work even better with sh.exe, and get 
> you even closer to having portable makefiles.
> 
> And if you want to run gcc/make from a Linux-like environment, or try 
> out individual commands interactively, there's the rxvt terminal 
> emulator to let you do just that. (The /bin executables have some 
> problems when run inside a DOS box, even if they're running inside a 
> sh.exe session inside a DOS box.)
> 
> 
> - Oops, have to cut this short, it's later than I thought. These are 
> just random suggestions; as I said, educating newbies isn't exactly your 
> core mission. But it might be a good way to wean Windows folk onto real 
> shells if you did feel so inclined.
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> Mike
>