Simple (?) Windows question

[Robert Goldman]

On 3/21/16 Mar 21 -4:16 PM, Dmitry Igrishin wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> 2016-03-21 23:57 GMT+03:00 Robert Goldman <rpgoldman at sift.net
> <mailto:rpgoldman at sift.net>>:
> 
>     On 3/21/16 Mar 21 -3:38 PM, Daniel Kochmański wrote:
>     > Don't know about the other implementations, but afair ECL puts :cygwin
>     > in the *features*. Maybe check, if trivial-features handles cygwin
>     > portably?
> 
>     That was a good suggestion, but I'm afraid the answer is "no." No
>     handling of cygwin in trivial-features.
> 
>     Unfortunately, there's also no :CYGWIN feature in *FEATURES*, at least
>     not in the February release I just installed on my VM.
> 
> Just curious, does anyboy know, how many lispers runs Lisp under Cygwin?

Note that from my POV there are 2 issues here:

1. ASDF should run correctly under cygwin.

2. At the moment, the only way I know of to run the tests on Windows is
through Cygwin, since they are based on make and a shell script.

It is possible that at least #2 could be eased by running under MinGW,
but I have never used MinGW. It sounds like it might not have as many
pathname incompatibilities as Cygwin.

I don't know if I can install MinGW without breaking my Cygwin install.
I'd hate to mess up my (extremely brittle and rickety Windows VM).  Any
advice (probably off-list would be best) would be much appreciated.

thanks,
r