RE: autoconf in pure MSVC environment?

[John W. Eaton]

On  7-Sep-2004, Brandon J. Van Every <address@hidden> wrote:

| In a UNIX universe, particularly a Linux universe, libraries are nicely
| packaged up and play well together.  These same UNIX libraries are never
| packaged up well on Windows, so the build environment can almost never
| be duplicated.

Doesn't Cygwin and its package system address some of this difficulty?
I've found it quite easy to install a working build environment using
the Cygwin installer.  It is my understanding that you could use this
environment to run autoconf on whatever it is that you are trying to
port to "native Windows" and get the information you need.  Then you
could even go on to use MinGW in that same environment to build your
application in a way that doesn't depend on the Cygwin DLL (so your
application is not subject to the Cygwin license).  Or you could use
one of the command-line wrappers for MSVC, etc.

| My rule of thumb is if a project is Cygwin
| / Mingw, they aren't serious about Windows support.  Part of this is
| cultural, not just technical: they're UNIXen and Windows is viewed as a
| second class citizen.

Likewise, I suppose the same thing could be said about most Windows
projects not being serious about support for Unixy systems.

Maybe it's just because the people who work on free software projects
that use Cygwin or MinGW are doing it because they enjoy it, and they
derive the most enjoyment from working on Unixy systems and they find
the Windows environment to be a PITA, for various reasons.

jwe

-- 
www.octave.org | www.che.wisc.edu/~jwe | Peace would shock and awe me.