Re: MSVC status

[Ralf Wildenhues]

* Christopher Hulbert wrote on Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 01:45:37PM CEST:
> Is there interest (besides mine) in libtool being able to use native
> Windows compilers from cygwin. I just find cygwin easier to
> use/maintain than mingw/msys.
> 
> In the branch I had been working on, I defined the libtool variable
> link_search_path_spec=-LIBPATH: for native Windows compilers when host
> was cygwin/mingw, and empty otherwise. Then in the -L flag parsing of
> the libtool script, it would use $link_search_path_spec if non-empty,
> and -L otherwise.
> 
> If it's interesting to others, I would like to get it to work with
> current libtool and hopefully merged in, but I need help on how it
> should be done (otherwise it will never be merged in). Is what I
> previously did a good approach to this?

Well, one of the problems with all the libtool-only approaches was that
they would fail if the package in question did not use libtool.  In that
way I find the current strategy much better: it fixes each thing in one
place only (well, at least mostly), and with that also fixes packages
using only Automake; or even only Autoconf + aclocal + a couple of
macros from Automake.

I would prefer to keep adding support for different features:
- sysroot
- msys + cl
- cygwin + cl
- msys or cygwin + other w32 compiler

as separate and as orthogonal as possible.  For one in order to maintain
sanity for the developers, and also so we can remain being not to far
from a releasable state for each of the tools.

Other than that, I defer to Charles and Peter's excellent replies.

Please note that nontrivial patches require copyright assignment papers
to be completed, which typically means at least a few weeks delay from
the start.  More off-list.

Thanks,
Ralf