[GRASS-dev] M$ SFU instead of Cygwin?

[Brad Douglas]

On Wed, 2007-06-27 at 11:06 +0200, Maciej Sieczka wrote:
> Hi
> 
> Forgive my ignorance but I haven't seen any discussion about this on
> GRASS lists yet.
> 
> I have just read about Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX (SFU) [1] -
> a UNIX subsystem that integrates with the Windows kernel as the Win32
> subsystem does. Unlike Cygwin which runs on top of the Windows shell as
> an emulator, SFU implements a true UNIX peer to the Windows shell,
> which provides better performance (I heard that GRASS happens to be
> slow in Cygwin).
> 
> I was wondering if SFU could be help for Windows GRASS users.
> 
> SFU provides Korn and C shells, most UNIX core utilities, perl, python,
> gcc etc. More are available from [2], eg. BASH.

Bah. :-)

> A problem is that it doesn't work on Windows 9x, Windows XP Home or
> Windows Vista.

That's reason enough not to use it.

> There's a detailed description of components and functionality on [3].
> 
> [1]http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=896c9688-601b-44f1-81a4-02878ff11778&displaylang=en
> [2]http://www.interopsystems.com/tools/default.aspx
> [3]http://www.softpanorama.org/Unixification/SFU/index.shtml

Unfortunately, they've MSized it, making it less easy to use as a
drop-in replacement.  Some of the string handling functions require some
extra "finesse" (eg. macros) to compile properly.  I'm sure there's
other differences.  At least they're finally POSIX.1 compliant.

Cygwin will hopefully be a thing of the past, soon.


-- 
Brad Douglas <rez touchofmadness com>                    KB8UYR/6
Address: 37.493,-121.924 / WGS84    National Map Corps #TNMC-3785