Re: MSYS using Junctions quirk

On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 2:53 PM, Earnie Boyd
<[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 1:38 PM, dmccunney wrote:
>>
>>> The tcsh, etc shells, are they Cygwin related or something else?
>>
>> Something else.
>
> Ok, good.  There could be issue with mixing these environments.

Which is why I want to be aware of issues.  Mysy mounts are one such:
it looks like I ought not to mix Msys tools with others.  The Gnuwin32
toolset looks like a reasonably good set of the standard command line
tools.  The fun part is a *nix like shell.  I started using Unix with
SysVR2 and am an old Korn shell guy, but if it uses the Bourne script
language and has decent interactive features like command line
editing, aliases, and functions, I can deal. This means bash, mksh,
and zsh are usable, but lets out tcsh for anything save occasional
use.  Back in the MS-DOS days, I used the MKS Toolkit, largely because
they *had* a good Korn shell port.

>> There are lots of third-party ports of Unix tools to
>> Win32, like the Gnuwin32 offerings and Karl Syring's UnxUtils
>> (http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/UnxUtils.html)  Zsh is Syring's port,
>> though there are a couple of others,  Just poking around on
>> Sourceforge, I've seen a POSIX compatibility layer implemented as a
>> device by a Russian developer, and installed by Add/Remove Hardware,
>> and an offering called PW32 that looks like it's trying to do
>> something similar to Msys. (That one hasn't been updated in a while,
>> and appears moribund.)
>
> I'll caution you with some of these.  IIRC, Zsh contains a fork
> implementation based on Cygwin's fork and from what I remember isn't
> being updated recently.  The last update of unxutils was in 2007;
> pretty old but if it works, so be it.

The UnxUtils tools seem to work well enough.  I have a couple of
different versions of zsh, of which one is Syring's.  But they are
based on older versions of zsh, that don't support things like
--version, so it isn't terribly clear what zsh code they were based
on.  (I know,  Look at the source...)

> PW32 is pretty much dead.  The developer used to communicate with the
> MinGW team.

Since it hasn't been updated in some time, that was my assumption.  I
was fascinated it existed, but unsurprised it was moribund.  I've lost
count of the number of promising open source offerings I've seen that
withered because the devs lost interest/didn't have time/whatever, and
they never achieved enough traction to induce someone else to pick
them up.

>> Everyone seems to implement a different set of the tools, and a
>> background effort here is to get the fullest possible set, which means
>> mix and match, with preference given to the most recent version
>> ported,
>
> And everyone tends to have varying goals.  MSYS was started to provide
> a means for MinGW to execute a typical configure and make process for
> building native tools.

Yep, and it apparently does it well .  I just don't happen to be doing
that.  All I need is a decent set of the standard command line tools
used outside of the development process, and access to a *nix like
shell on occasion.

> Earnie
> -- https://sites.google.com/site/earnieboyd
______
Dennis
https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519

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