Re: autoconf in pure MSVC environment?

[Russ Allbery]

Brandon J Van Every <address@hidden> writes:

> A preamble, in the hope of conditioning further responses.  I think we
> could go back and forth about cultural isses until the cows come home,
> but I'd be more interested in focusing on the feasibility of the
> problem, as stated in the subject line.

It's hard.  Autoconf scripts absolutely require a POSIX shell and the
standard shell commands (echo, test, sed, etc.) in order to run, so you
will need at least that amount of minimal Unix-like environment available,
leaving you possibly stuck installing Cygwin anyway.  The simplest
Autoconf scripts will only require, in addition to that, a compiler,
linker, and preprocessor that they can run, but you will likely need to
provide wrappers around MSVC to translate flags (or modify Autoconf, but
the wrapper is probably easier).

If you're talking about running Autoconf itself on Windows natively,
you'll need to port GNU M4.  I don't know how hard that would be.

Many packages also use Automake and libtool, and that's going to be even
more of an issue.  My guess is that libtool flatly won't work on Windows
without extensive porting.  Automake will at least require a POSIX make (I
doubt nmake will be enough).

Every package that I know of that builds under MSVC on Windows and also
uses Autoconf bypasses Autoconf completely and uses an MSVC project or
similar Windows-specific build environment when building on Windows,
rather than trying to reuse Autoconf.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>