Re: Making ORBit work with MS VS compilers

["Tor Lillqvist" <tml iki fi>]

> Then you really should consider trying parity. Although we're on
>  Interix, there should be no reason to not operate on Cygwin as build
>  environment.

Maybe with parity it's different but at least when building stuff on
Windows using the "normal" autofoo and libtool mechanism, I definitely
recommend staying away from Cygwin and using MSYS instead.

As Cygwin comes with "normal" headers for the libraries it includes in
/usr/include, and libraries in /usr/lib, with Cygwin there is always
the risk of confusing Cygwin headers with the headers of depencencies
you really want to use, and the risk of confusing Cygwin libraries
with the libraries you really want. At least, that is my experience
from back when I built the GTK+ stack for Windows on Cygwin, using its
gcc with the -mno-cygwin switch.

No such risk with MSYS. Even if MSYS technically is a fork of Cygwin,
MSYS is "just" the runtime where tools like sh, awk, sed and perl run,
not a development target by itself. Also, the main MSYS feature, i.e.
the automatic mangling of command-line file name parameters and
PATH-like environment variables fron Unix form to Windows form is
quite useful. Cygwin does not do this automatically, you might have to
insert cygpath calls here and there.

With extreme care it is possible to use Cygwin, sure. For instance the
way to build Mono on Windows with gcc is to use run the build on
Cygwin and use gcc -mno-cygwin. But I bet they have had to be quite
careful when constructing their Makefiles.

--tml