Re: autoconf in pure MSVC environment?

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Tue, 7 Sep 2004, John W. Eaton wrote:

> On  7-Sep-2004, Bob Friesenhahn <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> | Installing Cygwin is similar in magnitude to installing another
> | operating system.
>
> The last time I installed it, I just did a point and click "Next ->
> Next -> Next -> Finish" kind of install.  It took a while because I
> was downloading directly off the net, but if I packaged this stuff all
> up on a CD and had the same installer, perhaps with a few options
> omitted (we would not need to select a download site, for example) and
> configured so that only what is necessary for my package is installed
> by default, then why would it be any different than installing any
> other piece of Windows software?

I agree that Cygwin is pretty easy to install.  Programs linked with 
the Cygwin DLL "mount" the Windows filesystems using different paths 
(e.g. "/cygdrive/c") and if the mounts use Unix line termination 
conventions (the default), text files are in Unix format rather than 
MS-DOS format (i.e. can't be opened in Windows Notepad).  Due to the 
burden imposed on Windows users, Cygwin is best reserved for people 
who want to use Unix under Windows.

Programs built using the MinGW environment are normal Windows programs 
so they don't come with any user-visible baggage, but must be written 
to use the core Windows APIs (not nearly as difficult as it sounds 
since there is stdio and underscore-prefixed calls for traditional 
Unix APIs like open, close, read, & write).  Of course most Window's 
users will be extremely confused if the software does not come with a 
GUI and show up in the Windows "Programs" menu.

With appropriate wrapper programs (e.g. cc, ld, ar), the Microsoft 
compiler could be used with Autoconf executed under the MSYS shell 
environment.

The Microsoft command-line VC++ compilation tools are a free download 
so maybe someone should volunteer to work on this.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen