[cdt-dev] Proposed solution for bugzilla 62660: Remove the MinGW target

[Sean Evoy <sevoy@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,
After some consideration and a bunch
of experimentation, I have decide that the effort needed to support the
MinGW toolchain without MSYS is too great for the 2.0 release. Basically,
MinGW without MSYS is the worst of Win32 and POSIX rolled into one in terms
of generating valid makefiles. Frankly I am fed up with trying to coax
tools that do not support front slashes in paths into working in a generic
way. Given that MSYS is the recommended way to do development with MinGW,
I am proposing that for 2.0 we insist that anyone wishing to use MinGW
also install MSYS. In that case, there is no longer a requirement for a
Cygwin and MinGW target for Win32 hosts.  Rather, I am proposing that
we collapse the two into a Gnu for Windows target. Obviously, the ideal
would be to have a single set of target defs for Gnu tools, but there are
sufficient differences between them that this is not possible right now.

I do not foresee any great outpouring
of grief over this decision but you might need to recreate any projects
you made based on the MinGW targets by creating an appropriate Gnu-on-Windows-based
project and moving the files over to it. Existing Cygwin projects are unaffected
by this change.

Sean Evoy
Rational Software - IBM Software Group
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada