development on windows

[Graham Percival]

There's a surprising amount of interest in contributing to
LilyPond from Windows machines.  (err, I mean, from people *with*
Windows machines, not from the actual machines themselves)

As I understand it, people with Windows can:
- run GUB
- get the sources with git
- compile the docs without examples by running texi2html manually
- compile the docs with GUB
- write docstrings, fix bugs, and add new features to .scm files

However, they cannot:
- compile lilypond
- write bugfixes, new features, and "code janitor" C++ files


Is the above correct?  If so, is there any hope of changing the
cannot-compile status?  In particular,
- does anybody feel like making cygwin packages for the missing
  software?
- does anybody have VMware (commercial version) and feel like
  making a small Linux installation which has all the required
  software?  Potential contributors would be able to run this
  in the free VMware version.
- does anybody feel like making shell accounts available for
  windows users?  (I'm not at all certain how many windows
  contributors would feel comfortable using such a system, but
  I include it here for correctness)


I suspect that the answer to the above questions is "no", so I'll
write the CG / new website  to make this clear.  But it's worth
checking first.

Cheers,
- Graham