Re: autoconf + automake support for MSVC

[Michael Goffioul]

On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 11:26 PM, Peter Rosin <address@hidden> wrote:
> The web has a couple of different forked versions of cccl. What is
> the "upstream" for that script? There is ancient support for some
> version of cccl in libtool, but I didn't get it to work with any
> version of cccl that I found (some things might have worked, but
> there were loads of failures for simple things in the libtool
> testsuites. I have forgotten the details so don't ask...). So, I
> didn't want to create yet another fork of cccl, and instead fixed
> the 'compile' script in Automake to handle the bits that must be
> handled by the build tools (and taught libtool to deal with cl
> natively). What I didn't do was add all sorts of options to
> 'compile' to make cl look like gcc, because that way lies madness.
> Packages aiming for portability shouldn't assume gcc in the first
> place. End result, you have to feed optimization options and such
> in the way cl expects them.
>
> There is also the 'ar-lib' script that does the bare minimum to
> present a posixy archiver interface (albeit incomplete) to Microsoft
> lib, in a similar manner that 'compile' makes cl understand the
> -l and -L options (and a few others).
>
> All in all, I regularly use these scripts to build packages with
> cl, and the configure.ac/Makefile.am of those packages need not
> do special things to have it all work.
>
> A typical configure invocation might be (from an MSYS shell):
>
> .../configure CC="cl -nologo" CFLAGS=-MD LD=link NM="dumpbin -symbols" \
>  AR="/home/peda/automake/lib/ar-lib lib" STRIP=: RANLIB=: \
>  --enable-dependency-tracking
>
> configure.ac needs to have AM_PROG_CC_C_O which might not be one of
> the most common macros, but that's certainly not too bad. And when
> the mentioned branch in Automake git is merged I imagine there will be
> a macro named something like AM_PROG_AR that will make it sufficient
> to say AR=lib to configure, instead of pointing at 'ar-lib' explicitly.
>
> I don't think cccl is the future, I see it as the past. It's
> simply not needed when the needed bits are already in 'compile'.
>
> It's a bit sad to see all the effort going into writing private
> scripts wrapping cl into something that looks like gcc, when the
> effort could be spent making autotools just work instead.

I'd be happy to give those scripts a try when I get some time. I guess I have to
download/install autoconf/automake/libtool from git. Anything else?

When you want to compile a package, I guess you then have to rerun
autoconf/automake to get updated compilation scripts?

When configure.ac does not contain then AM_PROG_CC_C_O macro,
what do you do? Add it manually? For instance I checked PCRE code
(http://vcs.pcre.org/viewvc/code/trunk/configure.ac?revision=666&view=markup)
and couldn't find that macro.

Michael.