[Bug-gnubg] The future of Windows builds / Https etc.

[Michael Petch]

Howdy All,

First off Random.org admins have given GNUBG a bit of a reprieve. They
are allowing us to use http for the time being to retrieve numbers as we
have been doing. Thanks to Thomas Moulton on this mailing list for
getting the Random.org admins in contact with me.

For the time being we are okay.

There are issues building a number of libraries on the old tool chain
and development environment that I use for Windows production builds. I
am using an outdated environment from the latter 2000s. I was using
MSYS/MinGW.

I managed to set up an experimental build environment with the forked
version of MSYS - MSYS2 along with a MinGW tool chain.

The build of GNUbg wasn't perfect and the source code and configure
processing will have to be tweaked for a number of issues. I encountered
some issues with Python that have to be overcome as well as errors when
compiling with 3D boards. I was able to produce a 2D version that worked
reasonably well.

The good news was that I was able to build libcurl with a gnutls backend
with minimal fuss. I was able to create test code that could queries
random.org with https without any problems. This combination doesn't
generate licensing issues.

It will be 2-3 weeks before I can get everything ironed out. I am busy
with other things so I can't devote a lot of time to get this
environment set up properly and changes to the code made right away.

Thanks,
-- 
Michael Petch
GNU Backgammon Maintainer / Developer
OpenPGP FingerPrint=D81C 6A0D 987E 7DA5 3219 6715 466A 2ACE 5CAE 3304