Re: Cygwin build (was: Using GDB in NTEMACS)

[Jon Cast]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:

> In addition to the ones you raised, here are some more off the top
> of my head:

> * Are there good ports of X toolkits, such as Lesstiff?  Windows
> users generally expect to get file selection boxes and other similar
> dialog widgets, so if the toolkit you use does not include that,
> they will probably be unhappy.

LessTif is supposed to work under Cygwin-Xfree; no idea if it
qualifies as a ``good'' port---I'll look into that.

> * Do the ported toolkits support Windows fonts and/or
> Windows-specific encodings (a.k.a. codepages)?  If not, we will need
> to think how to let users work with Windows locales.

Dunno.

> * The shell issue: should the Cygwin port support only Bash, or the
> stock Windows shells as well?

What are the issues with supporting Windows shells?  PTY problems?

> * There's also this talk among users of the Cygwin port of XEmacs
> about it being very slow, especially in Dired.  I don't understand
> why would the Cygwin build be slow to the point that it annoys
> users, but perhaps we should try to do something about it.  For
> example, if the reason is that the pipe implementation is slow,
> maybe we should use the ls-lisp.el package in the Cygwin port
> instead of the external `ls' program.

<http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/emacs-devel/2002-February/006128.html>
and
<http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/emacs-devel/2002-February/006131.html>
seem to explain most of the speed difference.  Given these two
factors, I doubt ls-lisp.el would be much faster for a Cygwin port of
Emacs than ls would be.  The only way to be sure, though, is to do the
port and profile it, of course.  I don't think it's a concern for now,
though.

Jon Cast