[Success story] autoconf automake with foreign compilers.

[Vassilis Virvilis]

Halo to everybody,

It was just recently that I decided to port a personal project of mine 
to the new autotools (automake-1.6, autoconf=2.53). My project use no 
fancy OS/platform specific stuff. It is mostly plain old ANSI C doing a 
lot of number crunching (really a lot).

So I ported it to autoconf, automake. At that point I would like to 
thank everybody who ever contributed to either project. I am really 
thankful about both for your efforts and the final results.

OK that was easy. Porting is never that easy. I decided to push my lack 
a little, so here comes the interesting part.

I first tried gcc on a cygwin installation. Worked fine.

Then I thought to try another compiler. In my windows installation I 
have (besides cygwin):
   -MSVC 5
   -Borland C 5.5.1 (freely downloadable)
   -Digital Mars 8.2.x

Being the lazy guy I am I thought to try use them through WINE to avoid 
boot in windows. So I just took a shot on the compilers to see if they 
are functional under WINE.
   -Cygwin is mostly functional (actually required) but gcc does not 

    make it to produce executable.
   -MSVC 5.0 is fully functional
   -Borland BCC 5.5.1 compiles but not links :(
   -DM is fully functional

So now let's try autoconf on

-MSVC cl works like a champ. It needs to set environmental variables, 
but other than this, its command line is gcc compatible.
  -Under win32 works. For convenient libraries cygwin ar is used.
  -Under WINE it compiles nice but it uses linux ar to create the
   archives. Then the cl cannot recognize the format and the final
   linking fails due to unresolved symbols

-BCC needs a wrapper script. Things line -E for preprocessor, -e
 instead of -o for executable. I provided the wrapper script as an
 attachment
  -Under win32 it works (with the script) but fails on linking (cygwin
   ar instead of LIB). It looks that the borland linker is not so
   graceful as microsoft's.
  -Under WINE does not make it through autoconf. It does not produce
   executable due to a strange addressing bug in the link phase. There
   were reports for that matter in wine-devel so I will ask there.

-DM is brain damaged. Although it works flawlessly under WINE, it can't 
pass autoconf tests because it has practically no sane preprocessor mode.

So the real problem encountered so far was that I didn't have a way to 
overload the AR program variable like CC or AWK for example.

I am not subscribed to the list so if you would like any clarification 
or further instructions on how to reproduce my report feel free to CC me 
or mail me directly

That's all folks, thank you again.

     .Bill

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