Forestalling protests

[Jim White]

Paul Leyland wrote:
 
> Good luck.  It can be non-trivial trying to
> install software which is designed around the
> paradigm that "every operating system looks like
> Unix".  
>
> To forestall the inevitable protests, I'll
> state that it can be non-trivial to work around 
> the assumption that "everyone runs Windows". 

TG wrote:
> Well, GMP is part of the GNU project, and is mainly
> aimed at working with GNU.
> 
> It is just rude to say that it is designed using the
> paradigm that "every operating system looks like
> Unix".
 
I had a feeling Paul's "forestalling" would prove
ineffectual there!   :-)

I have to agree with TG, I'm a Windoh's user myself,
but find GMP's Unix-centricity both reasonable and
desirable, as well as being intrinsic (being GPL).

After all, the PC, and its operating systems, were
hardly designed (and I use that word in its loosest
possible sense) as vehicles for computational
scientists, right?

And, in contrast to Unix, whatever its flaws (I am in
fact generally critical of it from a theoretical pov),
it has resulted in a situation where complicated
packages like GMP can be made to work on a variety of
platforms.

So, given Windoh's (intentional?) incompatibility with
just about everything else, it is, IMHO, a minor
miracle that what I have here at home, a working GMP
dll, is possible at all!


Now, with regard to the original Cygwin problem, am I
right in observing that those of us who build GMP with
MinGW seem to encounter (or at least, report) fewer
problems than those who build with Cygwin?

So, perhaps an easier solution for the Cygwin/M4
problem originally described might be to simply
rebuild the GMP in question under MinGW.

Cheers

Jim White
ANU, Canberra



		
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