Re: MXE/MSVC

[Michael Goffioul]

On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 7:43 PM, Michael Goffioul <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi John,

I've looked at how I could hook my build scripts and patches into MXE for native MSVC compilation. I've worked on the MSVC supports tools (compiler wrappers and support libraries) and one sample package (libiconv). I've put the result in attachment: this patch only contains the modifications to the existing files, I didn't include the new files to keep the patch readable.

Could you have a look and let me know whether there are things you're not comfortable with.

Just one additional note: I added the concept of library/dll prefix and suffix. This is something I've been using in my build scripts for a while and it's mainly to avoid clash with other existing DLL with the same name. Unfortunately, packaging is not standardized under Windows, and pre-compiled binaries tend to also install their own version of support libraries (python, MiKTeX, Qt, MSYS, GnuWin32...). Problems start to appear when the same name is used for different version of the DLL and program directories are installed in your PATH.

I've been bitten by that in the past, so I decided to introduce specific library prefixes and suffixes to avoid name clash. All my DLL's are prefixed with "vc100-" (100 stands for 10.0, which is the version number of Visual Studio 2010).

I've been also positively surprized by the level of support for MSVC in modern libtool, as of libiconv-1.14. It used to be crap and I had to heavily patch the generated libtool script. It's much better now.

Michael.