Re: [h-e-w] Help for diff. Was - Help

[David Vanderschel]

On Friday, April 30, "Stephen Leake" <address@hidden> wrote:
>David Vanderschel <address@hidden> writes:
>> ... A more ambitious approach to getting these
>> utilities is to install Cygwin.

>Not clear why you say "ambitious" here. Cygwin gives
>you more stuff, but it is easy to install.

Stephen is apparently aware of both issues which led
me to make the remark:  the amount of stuff you get
and the ease of installation.

Regarding the relative ease of installation, Stephen
and I apparently disagree.  For the MinGW utilities
there is essentially no installation at all.  All you
have to do is to unpack the executables and put them
somewhere on your path.  With Cygwin there is far more
to download.  There is truly an installation process.
If you had been using emacs without Cygwin, there are
even some things you need to tweak in emacs to make it
play correctly with Cygwin.

As far as I could tell, all Alex needed was a copy of
the diff utility.  He does not need to install or
configure a rather complete program development
environment or even learn about such subtleties as
Cygwin's "mount" concept.  Given the level of his
question, I thought the MinGW solution was almost
certainly the better one for him; but I did not wish
to appear to be preventing him from knowing about the
"more ambitious" alternative.

Regards,
  David V.