Windows will no longer be supported by ASDF, or ASDF, Windows, Cygwin -- oh, my!

[Robert Goldman]

On 3/21/16 Mar 21 -8:59 AM, Stas Boukarev wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 21, 2016 at 4:16 PM, Robert Goldman <rpgoldman at sift.net> wrote:
>> On 3/20/16 Mar 20 -7:07 PM, Stas Boukarev wrote:
>>
>>> Then I guess SBCL holding back on ASDF upgrades is a good strategy after all.
>>>
>> Actually, no.
>>
>> The state of affairs on Windows is no worse than before.  My going back
>> to the shell-script based testing simply REVEALS that ASDF and UIOP have
>> never worked properly on Windows + Cygwin.  Nothing about that has
>> changed: if you run a CL implementation from inside Cygwin, it will
>> inherit a Cygwin environment.  Then RUN-PROGRAM will try to run local
>> programs using CMD.EXE, with an environment set up for Cygwin.  If
>> you're lucky, it might work.  But it's likely that the environment will
>> have bad pathnames in it, and your use of RUN-PROGRAM will fail.
>>
>> Nothing there has changed.  The only thing that has changed about that
>> is that I have announced it.
>>
>> So, no, a simple dragging of the feet will not fix this problem.
>>
>> The only thing that will fix this problem will be for someone who cares
>> about Lisp on Windows to commit some time to helping me get ASDF to work
>> properly on Windows.
>>
>> Meanwhile, not updating means that you will fail to see bug fixes like
>> the recent one that prevents ASDF from causing a stack overflow in the
>> presence of cycles in the file system (which can be created by symbolic
>> links, for example).  I have seen more than one bug report about this
>> from an SBCL user.
>>
>> Don't kid yourself that there's an easy answer.
>>
> I don't use cygwin on windows, does that mean I'm in the clear?
> 

I don't know.  I don't have a way to run the tests without Cygwin.
That's why I need help.  Need someone with a minimal level of competence
in Windows bat-files to figure out how to run the tests there.

The current test and build suites are based on Make and bash.  So they
essentially don't work w/o Cygwin (maybe they would work with MinGW? I
don't know). That means that Windows is essentially not tested.

Again, this is not something new.  Essentially, Windows has never been
effectively tested.  Dave Cooper and I have tried to test on Windows,
but only with Cygwin.

Is it possible that someone could make this work with Powershell? I
don't really know much about the current status of the windows platform.
 My impression is that it would be pretty difficult to port to make
everything work with just CMD.EXE, because it's so different and is
relatively crude.

R