[Rd] Adding Tk extensions to R for windows

[Nicholas Lewin-Koh]

Hi,
There would be no real difference that I could see. Msys is just a
modified version of the bash shell that uses cygwin.dll . The msys set of
tools is more convient to use than the cygwin becuse you don't have to
worry about mingw being first in the path and such. There are some small
differences but basically msys is cygwin lite but customized for the
mingw compiler and more amenable to natively compiled tools.

Nicholas

On Tue, 30 Sep 2003 10:27:35 -0400, "Duncan Murdoch" <dmurdoch at pair.com>
said:
> On Tue, 30 Sep 2003 14:42:34 +0100, "Marsland, John"
> <John.Marsland at CommerzbankIB.com> wrote :
> 
> >My understanding is that MSYS was designed to provide a Minimal SYStem to
> >complement the Minimal GNU tools. So you can run the ./configure on windows
> >just the same as any unix variant and make as normal. I understand it uses
> >native libraries rather then the cygwin.dll .. so should be faster??? 
> 
> Just to clarify:  currently R doesn't use cygwin.dll, just some of the
> tools in the toolset for building R do.  So I doubt if there would be
> a big speedup if any, but it might simplify things. You can currently
> run ./configure on Windows, it just doesn't produce a configuration
> that works :-(.  Fixing this is one of my projects for the next
> release.
> 
> >This would completely remove the need for separate windows project (except
> >for any platform specific devices eg graphics, GUIs etc ... MSYS provides
> >extensions for the win32 API also) - in exactly the same way and the new Mac
> >osX/fink build works. 
> 
> Essentially the main current need for separate windows code is the
> device support and the GUI. There is a bit more than that (e.g.
> separate makefiles), which are basically remnants of the days when the
> toolset was less capable.  There are also some things which can be
> handled by #ifdef's in the standard code (e.g. loading dynamic
> libraries).
> 
> I will take a look at Msys after the 1.8.0 release.
> 
> Duncan Murdoch
> 
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