Am I failing to foresee an issue with a cygwin symlink to Windows's python.exe?

Question

Should be an easy question. I have a windows version python 2.7 at C:/Python27/python.exe and I also have cygwin's installation at /usr/bin/python -> /usr/bin/python2.7.exe. This means that when I install a library/module using a windows installer, I don't have it in cygwin and vice versa. My solution was to create a symlink, /usr/bin/python -> /cygdrive/c/Python27/python.exe and then alias python="python -i" so that I get an interactive terminal in cygwin.

However, I found a number of other people throughout the internet who had similar problems, and no one recommended this solution. Am I missing something? Is this a bad idea? Thanks.

Answer 1

If any of your cygwin programs depend on Python, they may break. Remember that cygwin handles things like the mounts, some POSIX hooks. Cygwin scripts (rightfully) expect Python to work in a cygwin manner. I'm not sure what Windows python would do with /use/share/icons or whatever. You'd probably break a lot of system scripts.

Anything that uses libpython will have it in point to in essence an out of date install (since only the Windows side is being maintained)

I'd see the former more damaging than the latter, but the latter makes you maintain two versions again.

There may be libs (gtk?) That are not available on windows, but are on Cygwin.