Making things work on Windows

[Therem Harth]

I find it grimly funny, in this case, that the "C" in "CMake" stands for "cross platform."

[zaimoni]

+1. I find these kind of disputes really upsetting, especially when it's so clear that neither solution is technically superior to the other, they're just a matter of preference. The inability to be objective about what's best in the long run is really sad.

Did Bill Hoffman say why he wanted Cmake + mingw32 + mingw32-bash to be intentionally broken? The reasoning isn't obvious.

No, he did not. Not even after I explicitlly diagnosed why it was broken in the CMake bug tracker, and explicitly explained on the mailing list to another would-be user of CMake on MingW32 + MingW32-bash how to bypass the broken MingW32 configuration.

He just doesn't want it fixed, period. I think patches to fix would be explicitly rejected.

[zaimoni]

+1. I find these kind of disputes really upsetting, especially when it's so clear that neither solution is technically superior to the other, they're just a matter of preference.

The CygWin dev team decided that they wanted to be so *NIX that a program compiled under CygWin must use POSIX headers completely; mixing in Windows headers will break the build. This was a radical policy change from the initially officially requested policy which was to treat CygWin as a Windows variant.

Both partiies agreed that the requested change was impossible to maintain backward compatibility for. As lead developer for CMake, Bill Hoffman basically told the CygWin representative that backward compatibilty was more important than supporting current CygWin, and that was why the year-old patch to implement the CygWin-desired change had been rejected. The counter-proposal to use an option to allow the CygWin CMake port to diverge from upstream's insistence on backward compability, was not publicly accepted.