Making ORBit work with MS VS compilers

["Marcelo Vanzin" <mmvgroups gmail com>]

Hello all,

I decided to take a look at how to change ORBit so it works properly
with the VisualStudio compilers. I think I have a pretty good idea of
what needs to be done (I've done similar work for another library
recently), and I've played with the sources a bit and it shouldn't be
too hard.

I have a few questions, though:

- I decided to start with libIDL, since it's much, much smaller, to
get an idea of how the contribution process works and all. I've made
the changes, and I just need to install the Vista SDK at home to try
it out on Windows (I've tested similar things on my work computer
already, where I have VS 2003 available). Is this the right list to
send things about libIDL? I'm assuming it's somewhat "part" of ORBit.

- How should I send patches? Should I just attach the gzipped output
of "svn diff", or is there a tracker for patches?

- A more ORBit-specific question: there are a lot of functions in
several headers protected with a "ORBIT2_INTERNAL_API" define. Are
these *really* supposed to be internal to ORBit only (I know at least
a few of them are called in the test programs), or do other apps also
rely on these functions?

- Are there a few recommended apps/libraries for which I should get
the sources so I can make sure I didn't break things with my changes?

BTW, the instructions at
http://www.gnome.org/projects/ORBit2/download.html about how to get
the sources are terribly outdated. Someone should just provide a
source to the GNOME devel page instead. :-) Thanks for any help!

-- 
Marcelo Vanzin
mmvgroups gmail com
"Life's too short to drink cheap beer."