Sorry, I barely have time for arduino. I don't have time to figure out how to get avrdude to compile under windows. For now I'll release xmega arduino on mac and linux and provide a brief explanation about windows.

I understand that it was cygwin that changed. At some level that doesn't really matter to me, I'm stuck. But I appreciate how frustrating it must be for you. You didn't break it, but have to fix it if you want to support avrdude users who are on windows.

As for why should you pay for/obtain windows, well that's a philosophical issue. I'd say that because doing so furthers your ideological bent. A lot of folks move to linux/bsd because they gain experience with how great open software is through cygwin or other windows ports of great open software. If you purchase windows, and that results in just two folks moving away from windows, you've won.

I think avrdude is great. If you like, I'll pop for a copy of windows for you. Or if you prefer, I'll send you the disks to an old copy of windows I'm not using, so that MS gets no more money out of it. If you are interested, just let me know which you prefer. If you are not interested, I can respect that.

I generally work on OSX. I run XP within a VM so that I can support arduino users who use windows. I believe folks who are primarily linux developers can do the same, whether with VirtualBox/KVM/VmWare/or Xen.

I'm porting arduino to the xmega. I've put together packages for OSX. Using a VM I put together a package for Linux users, even though I use Linux infrequently these days. I'm trying to do the same for windows, even though I do not use windows myself.

I spent a couple hours trying to get avrdude to compile on windows yesterday. I don't recall all the failure modes.

I do recall that without the -static, that gcc complains that it no longer support no-cygwin and that I should consider using mingw. Which was somewhat irritating as the avrdude manual says:
    To build avrdude from the source You must have
    Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/).
As I'm sure you've heard, it takes hours to download and install cygwin. And I tried to get it to work because the manual said that cygwin was required, not mingw. If mingw is the correct build toolchain, it would have been nice if the manual had directed me to use MinGW.

Again, thanks for all the help.

avrdude manual section "A.2 Windows" says that to compile on windows one must use:
    ./configure LDFLAGS="-static" ...
configure fails. config.log says:
    .../ld: cannot find -lgcc_s

Other tweaks to configure and make fail in various ways.