Re: Question re: GNU coreutils for Windows

[Bernhard Voelker]

On 03/25/2015 03:14 PM, Eric Blake wrote:
> -mno-cygwin is obsolete (it was an old way to attempt to build a mingw
> binary without using a cross-compiler); these days, cygwin ships with a
> proper cross-compiler for directly building mingw apps.  But yes, it is
> possible to build pure mingw apps using the cygwin environment; and in
> fact, the MSYS project ships such binaries.  But it all boils down to
> what you want - if you want an entire ecosystem of ported applications,
> use cygwin (all pre-compiled, but those binaries all depend on
> cygwin1.dll);

I don't think using non-statically linked binaries is a good idea,
because of the dependency to that cygwin1.dll: if there's any other
such binary on the system which depends on another version of that DLL,
then your program won't start: AFAIR there can only be one cygwin1.dll
loaded at a time.

> if you want native applications statically linked, use
> mingw binaries (easiest when using the pre-compiled binaries from the
> MSYS distribution, but fewer applications available).

Do you mean the ones from here?
  http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/MSYS/Base/coreutils/
There's 5.93 only ... and they depend on 'msys-1.0.dll'.

AFAIK the best bet on Windows - when you want/have to avoid a complete
cygwin environment because you only need a few utils like md5sum.exe
- is still: http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/

Have a nice day,
Berny