Re: [patch #3946] Add make support for windows PE resources

[Sheldon Gill]

Nicola Pero wrote:

> OK - I don't follow you - I suspect you got confused - why did you call the
> variable xxx_RC_FILES then ?

I did get confused. I changed RC_FILES to WINRES_FILES and RCFLAGS to 
WINRESFLAGS *after* I submitted the patch, not before. (Note, no 'D')

It isn't that important, anyway.

> > > Also, on CVS we only add those rules for mingw32.  Maybe we should 
> > > always have
> >
> > Windres is open source and supports elf targets so you can use it on 
> > Linux. Beside which I thought it cleaner to have unconditional support 
> > and allow the GNUmakefile to control things. I like leaving decisions 
> > in the hands of the programmer.
>
> Ahm ... OK, good point and no big deal -- we can change it ... but ... 
> but windres is not installed on my (fairly comprehensive) GNU/Linux ... 
> so I guess it's not installed on most machines except for Windows.

That's the case. Unless you install a mingw32 cross...

> I thought the only reason to use windres when programming with GNUstep 
> was to have an application icon (and other Windows-specific resources) 
> compiled into your app. :-)

Yes, windows specific resources for various reasons. I have a suspicion the ELF 
support stems from an idea of Linux native applications which call WINE 
libraries...

> I suppose I could remove the conditionals, but that seems to imply that 
> every GNUmakefile adding a Windows icon to the application will be 
> clobbered with conditionals ... (no big deal though!)

Yes, and I think this is the way to go. It makes it nicely obvious when it 
is/isn't being included and leaves the decisions to the programmer.

> I can't think of any case where you want a windres file to use on all 
> platforms.  That would cause your program not to compile on Linux or 
> Apple (unless, presumably, you went throught the pain of downloading a 
> version of windres working on your platform, and installed it).  And you 
> could/should bundle your resources using the standard OpenStep .app 
> bundle methods that work reliably on all platforms!
>
> So I would leave it as it is, maybe enable it on Cygwin as well rather 
> than just Mingw ?

If you look at it from the "running on Windows" view then Cygwin should have 
it. If you take the "*nix compatibility layer" then it probably shouldn't. As I 
said earlier, I think "leave it to the programmer to decide the right 
conditionals" is the best choice.

> Btw, I might have misunderstood the usage of .rc/windres files entirely 
> ... to me it looked like the Windows icon was the main driver behind them.

For me the motivation to actually get it done was version resources. That way I 
could see it was -base 1.11d build31 and not -base 1.10.3r even though both 
files were called gnustep-base.dll

For very Step applications the main usage would be icons and version info. I 
also use -make for my pure C/C++ stuff thats related. For these projects 
windows resources become more important because they contain images, dialogs, 
strings etc.

> > > Another comment is that in this patch you have $(RCFLAGS) ... maybe 
>
> Thanks! -- I agree this is a good point, and it's missing in the current 
> gnustep-make.  We probably need to add something like WINDRESFLAGS, 
> similar to CFLAGS.  Quite simple ... I'll add it tomorrow. :-)

Great.

BTW, there is a secondary reason I wanted windows resources. I have some 
objective-c tools which I'd like to put a GUI face on. An ATL front-end would 
quickly give me a completely native look while the plumbing was objective-c. Or 
I could go silly and write an objc layer on COMCTL32 and friends...


Regards,
Sheldon