Cygwin is just a DLL, and it works reasonably well, but it does come with some nontrivial baggage:
- It's GPL licensed, or you buy a license from RedHat; either might be too onerous for the people who develop midipix
- You can only have one cygwin1.dll in memory at a given time; If you have two cygwin using programs, they must both use exactly the same version of the cygwin1.dll; Which means that you can't just distribute a self-contained cygwin program and expect it to work.
- It's a bit clunky at the edges, with the mounts (it looks like you have a /usr directory on the root, and you can see it with "ls" or cygwin "dir" but not cmd "dir", for example; user integration is a bit clunky).
I'm not sure midipix will be better - some problems are inherent. However, cygwin was designed around Win95/NT4 deficiencies some 20 years ago. It has evolved very gracefully, but it's possible a modern version without all that legacy will work better.
Like you say, some issue are inherent in the problem-space.
but... multiple versions of Cygwin can coexist these days. It did used to be an issue, granted. tho these days quite a few programs distribute their own cygwin dll and tools.
I agree, licensing may be an issue for some people.
Thanks. It's good to know that the multiple version issue has been addressed - although from the FAQ it sounds like there are still a few (unlikely) corner cases one needs to keep in mind.
- It's GPL licensed, or you buy a license from RedHat; either might be too onerous for the people who develop midipix
- You can only have one cygwin1.dll in memory at a given time; If you have two cygwin using programs, they must both use exactly the same version of the cygwin1.dll; Which means that you can't just distribute a self-contained cygwin program and expect it to work.
- It's a bit clunky at the edges, with the mounts (it looks like you have a /usr directory on the root, and you can see it with "ls" or cygwin "dir" but not cmd "dir", for example; user integration is a bit clunky).
I'm not sure midipix will be better - some problems are inherent. However, cygwin was designed around Win95/NT4 deficiencies some 20 years ago. It has evolved very gracefully, but it's possible a modern version without all that legacy will work better.