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

[Glynn Clements]

Maciej Sieczka wrote:

> Forgive my ignorance but I haven't seen any discussion about this on
> GRASS lists yet.

There's been a lot of "would SFU be useful" discussion, which
invariably stalls at "possibly; it would be nice if someone actually
tries it".

> 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).

Everything's slow in Cygwin.

> I was wondering if SFU could be help for Windows GRASS users.

Possibly; it would be nice if someone actually tries it. ;)

It's more likely to be useful as an alternative to MSys than to
Cygwin. I suspect that SFU isn't going to be sufficiently Unix
compatible to replace Cygwin (there's more to Unix than just POSIX).

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