Re: cygwin Digest 17 Jun 2017 08:20:29 -0000 Issue 10294

[Stephen Lyons <slysven at virginmedia dot com>]

I am new to *writing* to mailing lists so if I've done something wrong
please forgive me.

I would like to "cygport" the Mudlet GPL MUD {Multi-User Dungeon} client
to Cygwin - I have a cygport file (and currently a patch) that works to
compile a workable binary of the 3.1.0 release available as a tarball
from https://github.com/Mudlet/Mudlet/archive/Mudlet-3.1.0.tar.gz {other
distribution methods are available!} but Mudlet possesses a Lua
sub-system that users/MUD system operators can use to provide additional
functionality and this is currently proving awkward!

The issue I am having is that Mudlet needs some Lua "modules" to operate
and Cygwin currently only provides a sub-set of the needed ones, the
lua-file-system "lfs" IS available but also needed is:

* "rex_pcre"

* "zip"

* "luasql.sqlite3"

What is the best way to get those "run-time" dependencies into Cygwin? I
have found "luarocks" packaged versions (as "lrexlib-pcre", "luazip" and
"luasql-sqlite3" respectly) but it is not immediately apparent how I
might use that to generate the things needed as part of the "cygport"
process.

For the record Mudlet {https://www.mudlet.org} is carried on, at least,
the Debian & Ubuntu GNU/Linux distributions and it's developers do
target and aim to provide Linux, macOs and Window platform binaries as
well as source code. However the Windows one does suffer a little in
bug-fixes and performance because it is difficult to put together a
development platform (IMHO) for that OS that will work in both a 32 and
a 64 bit environment (as until very recently) the Qt people only made a
32 bit FOSS development environment available with a built-in Mingw
compiler and, of course, the alternative free MSVC compiler can not be
used to make binaries that can be distributed under GPL terms; the need
to compile/source the other libraries that Mudlet uses in a form that is
compatible with anything compiled with such a Qt/Mingw combination makes
the Cygwin environment much more user friendly for normally *nix system
based developers...

I should perhaps point out that I *am* one of the "upstream" i.e. a
member of the team that call ourselves the "Mudlet-makers" and I have
been using Cygwin on and off for years now... 8-)

I do miss the Qt Creator IDE when I switch to the Cygwin environment
though. 8-(

Stephen

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