John W. Eaton wrote: > Brandon J. Van Every wrote: > > | In a UNIX universe, particularly a Linux universe, > | libraries are nicely > | packaged up and play well together. These same UNIX > | libraries are never > | packaged up well on Windows, so the build environment can > | almost never be duplicated. > > Doesn't Cygwin and its package system address some of this difficulty? No. What happens in practice, is you have Cygwin vs. MinGW, building with Cygwin library vs. -fno-cygwin library, and support tools like GNU Make, bash, etc. all at different version levels. The same is true for all the underlying open source libraries that a moderately complex project uses. It's a nightmare. It's all completely broken crap. It works ok on UNIX because the tools are getting built, tested, and updated all the time. That testing never happens on Windows, so to quote Chinua Achebe, "Things Fall Apart." UNIXen tend to just glare at me when I bring these build issues up. The reason they glare is they *NEVER* face these build issues themselves. They just assume I'm some kind of whiner. They assume that UNIX reproducibility is Cygwin / Mingw reproducibility. It just ain't so. You should think of those compilers as UNIX's bastard stepchildren, with an extended Arabic family. > Likewise, I suppose the same thing could be said about most Windows > projects not being serious about support for Unixy systems. Yes, absolutely. But I haven't found an ideal cross-platform build system yet. Ideally, such a system would output VS7.1 .sln files for the Windows users, and Makefiles for the UNIX users. One Windows-centric project that acutally accomplishes this is The Nebula Device 3D engine. http://nebuladevice.cubik.org That is, I believe Linux builds are starting to happen now. But it's all just custom TCL scripts, not a general purpose build tool. I just asked them about what they did, and what wisdom they had. Really, none to be had. I realize that Microsoft has made the cross-platform build problem gratuitously hard, having dropped support for automatic Makefile generation as of VS7. But UNIXen aren't any better. They only deal with Makefiles, so really the attitude is "cross-platform, so long as your platform is UNIX." Cheers, www.indiegamedesign.com Brandon Van Every Seattle, WA "We live in a world of very bright people building crappy software with total shit for tools and process." - Ed Mckenzie _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@xxxxxxx http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf
