Re: [ITP] mingw-libjpeg, mingw-libpng, mingw-openssl

[Brian Dessent <brian at dessent dot net>]

Christopher Faylor wrote:

> I don't know that and a search of the debian site for the word "mingw"
> does not unearth any hits.

Debian's package search page is not always that great.  But they do
provide three packages (mingw32, mingw32-binutils, and mingw32-runtime)
which together form a linux-hosted, windows-targeted cross compiler. 
But these are of course native binaries, and debian does not (AFAIK)
distribute any actual target libraries or binaries for this toolchain. 
So in this case Debian essentially mirrors Cygwin exactly: we both
include the cross compiler and runtime, but no target libraries --
except for bzip2 and zlib in the case of Cygwin since these are needed
to build parts of Cygwin itself.

But that aside, I still agree that mingw libraries do not belong on the
Cygwin mirrors.  If taken to its logical conclusion the situation is
absurd: Two completely separate and independant versions of each
library, each tool, etc.  That would just be ridiculous, especially
considering the confusion it would cause and the fact that unless you're
in a specific niche most of those mingw- packages would just be useless
and confusing to you.  (And it is a "specific niche" because many
developers that use mingw do so without Cygwin, either by using mingw
directly with an IDE like DevCpp or with MSYS.)

That is not to say that the work that Peter has done is not useful --
although this business about "nobody needs/wants shared libraries under
mingw" is complete bunk.  All he needs to do is create the required
setup.ini using genini, and then tell people that need his packages to
just paste his URL into setup.exe.  Everybody wins.  He can even setup a
short web page explaining this, which will show up for googlers. 
Alternatively, he could package and make them avilable on the mingw
site, which has it's own kind of packaging system called mingwPORT.

I don't think anyone is saying that these packages wouldn't be useful,
it's just that they don't belong *here*.

Brian