Many times it takes me a while to properly compose my question before posting. Sometimes it's just a jumble of ideas and concepts, and is not something I'd want seen immediately. However, there is no way to save a partial question unless you post it.
This should work exactly like it does in Gmai...
$ ./luatex --version
/usr/local/texlive/2016/bin/x86_64-cygwin/luatex.exe: error while loading shared libraries: cygtexlua52-5.dll: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
@FaheemMitha so does cygwin (it has linux's notion) it's not as if I'm using any really native windows code here. But when I build from svn it doesn't make a separate lua library lua is statically linked to luatex as far as I can see, but for some reason in the binaries pulled from the pretest it relies on a library it hasn't built (cygwin has such a library but I don't think luatex is supposed to rely on the system lua). probably that's why it's a pretest release:-)
@PauloCereda see @FaheemMitha's comment above, where is !!/battle these days?
@FaheemMitha exactly. cygwin gives me an almost linux working day (I use X windows as my window system, apart from a few things) but I can get paid to do work that may involve testing IE or .NET or whatever.
@FaheemMitha yes, these days that would probably work as well, but I've been working on a cygwin based system for so long 15 years? and back then virtual machines hadn't really got the power. But anyway we need cygwin to build our windows products anyway, how else are you going to use make and svn and bash and whatever else that powers the build scripts:-)
@DavidCarlisle Wait a few years, and MS will probably build their own versions of make and bash. Assuming they haven't already. Apparently they've either decided Linux isn't a virus, or they've decided viruses aren't so bad. And svn is available on Windows, I think.