FreeTDS Development Group

[Steve Langasek <vorlon AT netexpress.net>]

On Tue, Oct 15, 2002 at 01:52:17PM -0400, Castellano, Nicholas wrote:

> I'm not sure whether Cygwin is a good thing.  I do have it installed on my
> Windows machine, because as you noted, it can be of practical value.  I just
> don't always think being practical is all that important.  Anything that
> might encourage someone to treat Windows as if it were a real operating
> system is certainly going to be suspect in my eyes (I'd better not follow
> this line of thought any further, or I might just remove cygwin support from
> FreeTDS just as Sven feared :-)

> So, I'm just not sure the dog has any legs at all.  But anything that
> improves FreeTDS portability is a good thing, and this experiment certainly
> turned up a number of interesting problems.

> As an aside, I have never personally asked rms what he thinks about Cygwin,
> but I'm willing to stick my neck out and guess that he thinks it's the worst
> thing that ever happened to the GNU project.  Not because he doesn't like
> Windows in particular, but because he doesn't like *any* proprietary
> software.  See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html and I'm sure
> you'll see my point.

If I have to use Windows, I'd rather have it than not; but I'd rather not
have Windows at all. :)  I also don't think that absolute portability is
*always* a good thing, because sometimes, portability means bloating your
own code to work around the limitations of decrepit platforms -- not just
on Windows, but on other Unices.  Porting to just the Free Unices, and
making things work on 11 Linux hardware architectures, tends to shake out
the portability bugs that I care about...  If others need stuff to work
on other platforms, I'm always willing to play nice, but I'm also not
going to go out of my way to write code for platforms that have one foot
in the grave already.

Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer

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