RE: Making ORBit work with MS VS compilers

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

> 
> > Attached is our patch for ORBit2-2.14.2, which also fixes the idl
> > compiler to create code that can be built into a Windows dll.
> 
> Sorry for taking so long to get back to this issue... I haven't really
> done anything about this in the meantime. I had a look at this patch
> now.
> 
> The patch changes this in Makefile.shared:
> 
> -	$(IDL_COMPILER) $(IDL_FLAGS) --deps $(*D)/.deps/$(*F).idl.P $<
> +	if test `uname` = "Interix" ; then \
> +		$(IDL_COMPILER) $(IDL_FLAGS_W32) --deps
$(*D)/.deps/$(*F).idl.P
> `unixpath2win $<`; \
> +	else \
> +		$(IDL_COMPILER) $(IDL_FLAGS) --deps
$(*D)/.deps/$(*F).idl.P $<; \
> +	fi
> 
> Surely this approach can't be feasible in the long run? If the
> eventual goal is for instance to make those modules in the GNOME stack
> that currently can be built for Win32 with mingw on msys also
> buildable with parity on Interix, aren't there hundreds of Makefiles
> and other places where similar stuff would need to be changed then?
> Ditto for the other parts in the diff where unixpath2win is involved.

First of all Hi :)

Parity got better in the meantime, and any binary that is built with
parity understands all kinds of paths, also interix ones. So the
unixpath2win can be omitted if $IDL_COMPILER points to a binary that was
built with parity (which should be the case anyway)

> 
> Is it possible to use "mounts" like MSYS in Interix? I.e., is it
> possible to make an Interix "Unix" path like /foo/bar refer to the
> same actual location as the Win32 path X:\foo\bar? (Where X: is the
> drive you are doing the work on, hopefully you don't have to use
> several drive letters) Then one could simply require that such mounts
> are used and no unixpath2win invocations would be needed to be added
> all over the place.

On interix /dev/fs/C maps to C:. there is no other means of mounting
anything.... but the whole last paragraph is obsolete because as I said
already, parity built binaries can handle both styles of paths, even if
you mix them (only exception: in a path list (separated by : on interix,
and ; on windows) all paths must be the same style (either windows or
unix) or otherwise the path conversion routines will get confused...)

> 
> I think at least currently Interix is not really that popular among
> people porting software from Unix to Windows. I don't feel it would be
> worth it at this point at least to apply your patch to the sources,
> sorry.

Hmm... yeah, but interix _will_ get popular I think/hope/believe, since
I made a port of Gentoo Prefix to interix, which enables even the use of
gnome-terminal. From there onwards I'm just working on being able to
build native windows binaries too, which would make things really cool
:)

Cheers, Markus

> 
> --tml