Re: newby question: to use or not to use ?

[Keith MARSHALL]

Benoit SIGOURE wrote, quoting Joao Miguel Ferreira:
>> One more question: is there support for the VMS operating system ?
>
> I think so.  (never used it though)

Interesting.  How do you run Bourne shell scripts on VMS, which has
a unique command language, all of its own?

> For Windows I hope you'll work with either Cygwin or MinGW because
> autoconf/automake/libtool don't directly support the Microsoft
> compiler (although it is possible to get it working with the
> autotools by hacking your build system a little bit with some
> wrappers such as cccl or WGCC).

The problem goes beyond the support for Microsoft's own compiler; the
native Woe32 shell, (cmd.exe), also is incapable of running Bourne
shell scripts.  Cygwin gives you that capability, and also provides
the GCC compiler suite, but adds an implicit dependency on Cygwin
itself, for your distributed code.

MinGW alone is not sufficient; it gives you a variation of GCC, which
can build native Woe32 executables, with no non-native dependencies,
but it can't, on its own, run autoconf generated configure scripts;
for that, you also need MSYS, from the MinGW project, or an adapted
Cygwin hosted build system, running the MinGW variant of GCC, (or
maybe some alternative environment, which can run scripts written
for Bourne shell).

Regards,
Keith.