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Re: mintty/Windows interoperability


On Thu, Jun 03, 2010 at 02:14:29PM -0600, Warren Young wrote:
>On 6/2/2010 7:02 PM, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>>>
>>> Does mintty currently work around any such problems?
>>
>> I really don't understand the question in light of the observations that
>> there will be problems with some MS-DOS applications if we switch to
>> mintty because of cygwin's pty implementation.
>
>I'm asking if mintty currently supports more MS-DOS apps than it did 
>when it first came out a couple of years ago.  If so, I assume it does 
>so because it does more work to convince those apps that everything is 
>as expected.

I think you're really missing something basic here.  I'll say it again.
The problem with MS-DOS apps is with Cygwin's implementation of ptys.
If mintty were to work around that it would be subverting Cygwin's pty
layer which would be a bad thing.

>If so, current and future breakages could be handled by more
>workarounds.  Ugly, sure, but right in line with the current guiding
>design principles behind Cygwin itself: stuff stays broken until
>someone cares enough about it to fix it.  Meanwhile, we sit back and
>enjoy the remarkable behavior that has been provided so far.

Once again: I'm talking about the tradeoff between the A.  "I can't run
my MS-DOS program under mintty/xterm/rxvt" and B. "I can't believe
Cygwin has such a crappy terminal!" My suggestion is that we've probably
the point where the number of people in state B.  outweigh the number of
people in state A.  So, in theory, switching to mintty will provide a
better end-user experience to more people.

cgf


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