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

[Duft Markus]

Keith MARSHALL <> wrote:
> 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).

Hi

WGCC was written exactly for those reasons. It needs Interix (it doesn't
really need, but autotools need it to run shell scripts, etc.), and
knows how to translate interix (UNIX style) paths to windows style for
the microsoft tools, which it uses to compile and link. However the
front end acts like gcc, so it will not break your build system.

Also you won't have any additional dependencies, only a few lines of
code from a header file to rename some of the microsoft functions
starting with "_" to versions without "_", and implementations for regex
and dirent stuff. (It also adds some path handling from environments).

All together you will get *native* windows binaries, without *any*
dependency to something you don't want.

Also WGCC provides advanced shared library handling which even makes it
possible to use LD_PRELOAD with native windows binaries... (imagine a
valgrind for windows ;o), that would now be possible in kind of a
"light" version ;o))

Interix is needed only at build time, not at runtime at all.

Cheers, Markus

> 
> Regards,
> Keith.
> 
> 
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