[Gnash-dev] Re: Development for Win32

[zou lunkai]

>> Let me ask what has been done with Win32 port until now or where else
>> can I find info about that?

>Dossy has been doing win32 builds using mingw on Windows 2003. The only
>Windows-specific code at the moment is in plugins/win32, but there are
>also Windows-specific includes where needed.

Gnash doesn't support MSVC8 build for a time, the old project file was
discarded.
It would be great if you have time to maintain a new project/solution
file under
MSVC8. That would help a lot for both debugging and testing, for people
who uses windows, and then for the project itself.

>> My own approach would be to work with MS Visual C++ compiler instead
>> of GNU compiler ports to Win32 and address IE plugin (that is ActiveX)
>> as well. That would cause branching of the build files and tools
>> because of the need to include Visual Studio solutions, projects and
>> DOS batch files in source distribution.

>I don't see this as a great problem. A while ago we had a win32
>directory with a msvc++ (VC8) project file and some other things (I
>think the code that became Gnash was initially developed on Windows),
>but it was removed because it was out of date. It can be retrieved if
>it's of any help.

I'd suggest make a new solution/project file for current Gnash souce code,
the old project file should be completely useless now.  The source files(file
names and directories) have been changed a lot. But you need to know
which are the files you need to build. There are multiple GUIs and renderer
backends, and some other tools. You probably don't want to build all of them.

>We do our best to use only standard C++, and where system functions are
>necessary we use compatibility headers or ifdefs, so I dare to guess
>that the code should build with msvc++ without massive adjustment. The
>main barrier to people doing in the past has been having to build some
>dependencies natively as well, but it sounds like you don't have
>problems with that.

MSVC8 should compile most of the souce code(there are people used it for
debugging before), so there's no big problem. But you should still have many
things to do. MSVC8 and the linux environment have quite different opinions
about what the "standard" functions are. There are C/C++ standard and
posix-standard. Many posix-standard functions/headfiles do not exists under
MSVC8. That would be a barrier of the porting work.

Good luck:)

--zou