[GRASS-dev] GUI platforms

[Glynn Clements]

Michael Barton wrote:

> There is really no issue for Mac. It IS Unix. The issue under windows is
> that Cygwin is simply a problem for many Windows users. It there is a way to
> run GRASS without it, it will make GRASS available to a much wider audience
> that wants to run it.

It may also signficiantly improve the performance of GRASS on Windows. 
Cygwin is /massively/ inefficient, primarily because it tries too hard
to exactly replicate Unix semantics.

E.g.:

+ All OS resources (file handles etc) are managed so that they will be
dealt with correctly if you subsequently call Cygwin's fork() or
exec() implementations, even though it usually isn't necessary.

+ stat()ing a file will cause it to open the file to check whether it
has a "#!" at the beginning, so that it can figure out whether the
permission bits should include execute permission.

+ stat()ing a directory will cause it to scan the directory to count
the number of subdirectories so that the hard-link count is correct.

FWIW, if I need to do Unix-style file-management operations on my
Windows box, I usually do it from my 800MHz Linux box via network
shares, as that's usually faster (often much faster) than using the
same commands under Cygwin on the 3GHz Windows box.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>