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Shell Environments for Windows
Jan. 4th, 2025 04:11 pmI remember sending in a bug report to the developers of GNU make. They refused to fix the bug because cygwin and msys bash were, in their opinion, the only viable shell options on Windows and the only environments they wanted to officially support. When I tried to build autoconf with a natively built version of make on Windows, it just hung. There's also the problem of using make on Windows without a shell. The command prompt has a limitation of how many characters can be passed to it. Typically, it's not enough to be able to run many of the commands used in standard makefiles. So, using make with a shell on Windows is a requirement to work with typical makefiles from many Free, Libre and/or Open Source software projects.
Several years later, the landscape for Windows has changed. It's still incredibly hard to find a standard port of POSIX shells outside of Cygwin, msys and now msys2 projects. However, there are options. Some of the older options that were around when I reported the bug are winbash (an older version of bash natively ported to Windows) and winZsh (which has not been maintained for a while). More recently, with the port of busybox to Windows in the busybox-w32 project, we have access to a modern shell. That project makes the ash shell available. It can run natively in Windows. The one drawback is that you need to build busybox-w32 on a Linux machine with a cross-compiler. I did recently manage to build ash natively on Windows with a lot of patching and my own custom makefile. Another option is to use midipix to build bash or other shells but it has similar licensing constraints to Cygwin and the msys projects. An alternative that I haven't seen a lot of information about is using bash from WSL via the Windows command prompt. You actually don't need msys or similar environments with this option. You can run a cross compiler and Linux tools via WSL and access them all from a standard Windows command prompt outside of WSL. That opens up a lot of possibilities. There were other projects that were supposed to port shells to Windows that still haven't shared much in the way of results. I remember offering to work with the developers of the mksh to port it to Windows. They said they already had someone working on the port. I've yet to see a publicly available, natively built mksh running on Windows. Plus, with all these Windows shell options, I still haven't seen a fix to the GNU make project. I do continue to patch my builds of make with my own patch for the issue.
WSL is great for development on Windows. Even with WSL, Busybox-w32 and environments like Cygwin, msys2, msys and midipix, I still like the idea of a minimal native build system and shell. I'd like something I can build from source for myself on Windows. I'd also prefer to use tools with more lenient Open Source licenses over GNU GPL and AGPL options. I'm going to be experimenting with replacing the msys environment on my system with more native options that don't obscure my actual file path names and don't require compatibility with GPL licenses to get POSIX style core utility programs to work. I will still need some standard POSIX style utilities and programs if I want to build FLOSS projects that use GNU autotools. However, I've been avoiding using cmake for FLOSS projects that use it by creating my own build files. I may start doing that in the case of some FLOSS projects that use GNU autotools. libressl comes to mind since a change to their build scripts made them no longer work on Windows and I've yet to hear if they'll fix the issue or not. I've been using cDetect, GNU make and pkgconf for my build scripts. I wish someone would come up with a simpler replacement for GNU make that still offered enough flexibility to build FLOSS projects that require make.
The build environment I'm working towards will probably look like the following... I'm building ash from Busybox-w32 natively with my own scripts. I'm using a combination of POSIX style core utilities from projects such as Minix, sbase and BSD. I'm hoping for compatibility with Open Group standards not necessarily with GNU standards for the various utilities. At the moment, I'm using the GNU gcc compiler built from source. However, llvm is a nice option. I just haven't seen an easy way to build it from source on Windows. My main goal is to be able to build all parts of my environment from source code. It may not have as many features or as much compatibility as other development environments available on Windows. However, I like the idea of being able to modify and change the source code of every tool I use whenever I want to. One other thing I'd like to look for is a console program that I can build natively with my C compiler. If I get everything working for Windows, a lot of it will probably port to other environments fairly easily.
I know most people prefer to just download a prebuilt environment or let their package manager do that for them and they don't care about the ability to build every part of their development environment from scratch. However, if this does sound interesting to anyone else, if you're working on something similar or if want to discuss parts of this project with me further, feel free to contact me. You can reach me via Mastodon or Bluesky.
Several years later, the landscape for Windows has changed. It's still incredibly hard to find a standard port of POSIX shells outside of Cygwin, msys and now msys2 projects. However, there are options. Some of the older options that were around when I reported the bug are winbash (an older version of bash natively ported to Windows) and winZsh (which has not been maintained for a while). More recently, with the port of busybox to Windows in the busybox-w32 project, we have access to a modern shell. That project makes the ash shell available. It can run natively in Windows. The one drawback is that you need to build busybox-w32 on a Linux machine with a cross-compiler. I did recently manage to build ash natively on Windows with a lot of patching and my own custom makefile. Another option is to use midipix to build bash or other shells but it has similar licensing constraints to Cygwin and the msys projects. An alternative that I haven't seen a lot of information about is using bash from WSL via the Windows command prompt. You actually don't need msys or similar environments with this option. You can run a cross compiler and Linux tools via WSL and access them all from a standard Windows command prompt outside of WSL. That opens up a lot of possibilities. There were other projects that were supposed to port shells to Windows that still haven't shared much in the way of results. I remember offering to work with the developers of the mksh to port it to Windows. They said they already had someone working on the port. I've yet to see a publicly available, natively built mksh running on Windows. Plus, with all these Windows shell options, I still haven't seen a fix to the GNU make project. I do continue to patch my builds of make with my own patch for the issue.
WSL is great for development on Windows. Even with WSL, Busybox-w32 and environments like Cygwin, msys2, msys and midipix, I still like the idea of a minimal native build system and shell. I'd like something I can build from source for myself on Windows. I'd also prefer to use tools with more lenient Open Source licenses over GNU GPL and AGPL options. I'm going to be experimenting with replacing the msys environment on my system with more native options that don't obscure my actual file path names and don't require compatibility with GPL licenses to get POSIX style core utility programs to work. I will still need some standard POSIX style utilities and programs if I want to build FLOSS projects that use GNU autotools. However, I've been avoiding using cmake for FLOSS projects that use it by creating my own build files. I may start doing that in the case of some FLOSS projects that use GNU autotools. libressl comes to mind since a change to their build scripts made them no longer work on Windows and I've yet to hear if they'll fix the issue or not. I've been using cDetect, GNU make and pkgconf for my build scripts. I wish someone would come up with a simpler replacement for GNU make that still offered enough flexibility to build FLOSS projects that require make.
The build environment I'm working towards will probably look like the following... I'm building ash from Busybox-w32 natively with my own scripts. I'm using a combination of POSIX style core utilities from projects such as Minix, sbase and BSD. I'm hoping for compatibility with Open Group standards not necessarily with GNU standards for the various utilities. At the moment, I'm using the GNU gcc compiler built from source. However, llvm is a nice option. I just haven't seen an easy way to build it from source on Windows. My main goal is to be able to build all parts of my environment from source code. It may not have as many features or as much compatibility as other development environments available on Windows. However, I like the idea of being able to modify and change the source code of every tool I use whenever I want to. One other thing I'd like to look for is a console program that I can build natively with my C compiler. If I get everything working for Windows, a lot of it will probably port to other environments fairly easily.
I know most people prefer to just download a prebuilt environment or let their package manager do that for them and they don't care about the ability to build every part of their development environment from scratch. However, if this does sound interesting to anyone else, if you're working on something similar or if want to discuss parts of this project with me further, feel free to contact me. You can reach me via Mastodon or Bluesky.
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