RE: Making ORBit work with MS VS compilers

["Duft Markus" <Markus Duft salomon at>]

Tor Lillqvist <> wrote:
>> 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.

Hm. I haven't tried MSYS, and for sure, parity would understand only
windows style paths there (since there is no MSYS build of parity yet,
which would understand the unix style paths there). This support is
built-in right now for cygwin and interix only.

OTOH unsetting CPATH and such things should keep parity from getting the
wrong headers, it knows about it's own (microsoft's) include
directories, and adds them by itself.

> 
> 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.

So then it wouldn't matter if parity understood only windows paths (i.e.
it was built with cl.exe as native win32 executable, and not with mingw
gcc (which i think would result in a mess, since the compiler couldn't
convert the mingw unix style paths to something that cl.exe
understands....))? Cool :)

Cheers, Markus

> 
> 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