Re: Using Perl's cc

[Gavin Smith]

On 3 July 2015 at 21:47, Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote:
> The MinGW build process uses MSYS tools, which allow to run Posix
> scripts and Makefiles to build MinGW (i.e. native Windows) programs.
> These MSYS tools, including Perl, use a different (and incompatible)
> runtime, so even if the extension could be built, it would not work
> for one of the two Perl binaries.  Whereas the design of this feature
> most probably assumes that the same Perl is used on both occasions.

Why does the MSYS installation of Perl have to be used at all? I
imagine there would be some texi2any.bat file that would make sure to
use the right one.

It's like compiling against a shared library, and then trying to use
it against an incompatible version of it. In this case Perl is like a
shared library (thinking of things back to front, because you could
also say that the loadable XS module is a library that is *being* used
and not using something else). You need to have all the right versions
of shared libraries present for the programs to work, and it's the job
of the distributions to make sure that this happens. What's the
alternative, anyway?

> That project comes with its own version of MinGW and the rest of the
> development tools, which is too much.  I, for one, will never let any
> distribution to overwrite my carefully configured and tuned MinGW
> development environment: I worked too hard on having that set up.

Can't the two be installed in parallel?