Can MKS Toolkit and Cygwin safely co-exist on Windows servers?

[Peter A. Castro]

On Mon, 16 Nov 2015, Kenneth Wolcott wrote:

> Date: Mon, 16 Nov 2015 16:54:00 -0800
> From: Kenneth Wolcott
> Subject: Can MKS Toolkit and Cygwin safely co-exist on Windows servers?
> 
> Hi;

Greetings, Kenneth,

>  I now work in a Windows-centric build and release environment.

I feel you pain :)

>  The MKS Toolkit currently exists on most (if not all) of the Windows servers.
>
>  If I were to install Cygwin, would it conflict with MKS Toolkit?

Yes and no.  The toolset overlaps, obviously.  Some behaviours will be 
different as some features in MKS may or may not be the same in Cygwin,
vis-a-versa.  But if you are thinking of having both paths in %PATH%, 
then, no, just don't do that.  Use one or the other.

>  Secondly, I'm really confused about 32bit versus 64bit servers;
> should I just use 32bit Cygwin to be sure?

MKS, unless I'm mistaken, is (still?) 32-bit, but that's not really saying 
much.  I guess the answer would gate on what specifically you are 
concerned about.  The 64-bit release of Cygwin is stable and mostly as 
complete as the 32-bit offering.

The two toolsets will only externally interface, like any other console 
program on Windows (eg: pipes, sockets, process spawning, file handles, 
etc) but other aspects (IPC, memory sharing, threading, etc) won't cross 
between them.

Other thinks might get in the way.  MKS still supports/prefers using DOS 
file syntax while Cygwin prefers the Unix/POSIX syntax, which can present 
a problem for generating file paths and feeding them to some non-Cygwin 
programs (re: "/cygdrive").

Cygwin also has a concept of an installation root where important things 
live (like config files in "/etc").  MKS has less of this kind of locality 
but does have some of it none the less.

32-bit vs 64-bit?  Not really much difference.  You might as well use the 
64-bit release as everything will eventually be 64-bit.

>  I'd like to eventually replace MKS Toolkit with Cygwin if everything
> works out.

Oh!  I've been there and tried to do that but was shutdown for corporate 
policy reasons.  Remember that business wants someone to shoot at when 
things break.  That license you have for MKS means your company can demand 
support from someone.  Cygwin is "free" and support is really just this 
email list and "WJM". :)

That being said, I was able to swap out MKS for Cywgin (at least on my 
workstation) and it largely worked very well.  Some things were slower, 
but the toolset offering is much richer and I was able to use commands not 
available in MKS.

>  I have the feeling that I'm wading into the deep part of the pool
> and I don't know how to swim :-)

Deep and very cold too!  I wish you well on your adventure!

>  Thanks in advance for advice and pointers.

Don't try and use MKS and Cygwin together.  Use one set or the other.  If 
you have any other tools that use explict paths, change them to not do 
that.  There will be differences, so resign yourself to this fact and work 
to make your other tools environment agnostic.

CR/LF may become your enemy as some tools will still make some assumptions 
about line termination.  There's no right/wrong here.

In my particular case, we swapped out "make" and most of the other 
command-line tools just fine, but ran into file path differences for 
things like a 3rd-party compiler that doesn't like "/" in unquoted path 
names.  Also, try and not to use absolute paths.

Good luck!

> Thanks,
> Ken Wolcott

-- 
--=> Peter A. Castro
Email: doctor at fruitbat dot org / Peter dot Castro at oracle dot com
 	"Cats are just autistic Dogs" -- Dr. Tony Attwood

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