Version control on Windows (was Wikipedia iPhone app official page?) - Wikitech-l

5 Sep 2009

2009/9/5 Dmitriy Sintsov &lt;questpc(a)rambler.ru&gt;ru>:
...
  * Marco Schuster &lt;marco(a)harddisk.is-a-geek.org&gt;
[Sat, 5 Sep 2009 
...
   If Windows had
a decent command line / shell (has its suckyness  improved
> for
> Win7?), I bet that TortoiseSVN had far less downloads... it simply is
> the
> only way to make SVN usable on Windows. 
...
  Old Windows Shell will be replaced by this one:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_PowerShell
 But I've read long time ago that usability of Windows Shells is limited
 not just because the syntax is weak, but, what's more important, process
 startup delay is much longer than in Linux, thus, calling of lots of
 external console programs to perform complex actions would be much
 slower at the same machine. My own scripts (eg mediawiki video sitemap
 generator seem to prove that) 

Yes. Cygwin has the same problem: it can take *ages* for a process to
be forked from the command line. Running ./configure on software in
Cygwin is *way* slower than on Linux. Creating processes on Windows is
a heavyweight thing however you do it, it appears.

- d.