Re: Windows port?

[Jason Bacon <outpaddling%yahoo.com@localhost>]

On 05/29/18 14:44, Sevan Janiyan wrote:
> On 29/05/2018 19:53, Jason Bacon wrote:
> > Here's one more data point for this thread and then I'll shut up...
> >
> > I timed the pkgsrc bootstrap under Cygwin at 71 minutes, 37 seconds,
> > minus my response times.
> >
> > I'd be interested in seeing some data showing WSL performing better than
> > Cygwin, as I've seen a couple claims to this effect.
> >
> >  From my perspective, the choice between them would come down to factors
> > other than performance, as they both look pretty abysmal for system-call
> > intensive tasks.
>
>
> Just as a food for thought, consider these components as a means to
> survive the struggle of being on Windows rather that making it a main
> driver and by that I mean, run the binaries there, don't use it for
> building.
>
> When WSL was in beta, I had success running the binaries I build on
> Debian 7.x without issue, this broke when I went to 8.x and eglibc
> became newer than the version in WSL.
>
> For cygwin, the idea is that you can normally cross-compile for it from
> !windows but I suspect this will require further work from our side in
> pkgsrc
>
>
> Sevan

I generally promote Cygwin to researchers with minimal Unix experience 
as a means of connecting with our Unix development servers and HPC clusters.

A cygwin installation with just the openssh, rsync, xinit, and xhost 
packages is all they need to work on our dev servers and clusters from a 
Windows machine.  Add a few more packages like gcc, clang, vim, etc. and 
they can do lightweight development and testing of POSIX code that can 
be compiled and run on our clusters.

This is documented in our user's guide:

    http://uwm.edu/hpc/support/

I just added some content on WSL based on this discussion.

If they need much more than this, I recommend getting a real Unix 
system, maybe starting with one of our VMs:

    http://www.peregrine.hpc.uwm.edu/vm.php