[cairo] Re[4]: Cairographics on win32

[Mike Emmel]

I think a more productive approach is to identify  the failings of
autoconf and friends for the Win32 platform and determine if it can be
fixed instead of throwing it out. I've not seen that they can't be
made to work better.  For example if the Visual Studio project file
format is understood then just generate the file as a target.

Basically what would be needed to make autoconf work on Win32 well and
does it make sense to do it ? If not then discard it. Personally I
think auto-tools have gotten the closest to a real crossplatform build
tool then anything else I've seen there far from perfect but I think
it would be better to spend time fixing them for win32 then dumping
them. Generally I've found "Windows" build tools to break horribly
between windows variants so the windows build stuff only works for a
few windows enviroments. Autconf can at the minimum tell me what I
need to get a correct build enviroment.

Mike



On 4/13/05, Hans Breuer <hans at breuer.org> wrote:
> On 08.04.2005 02:09, Tor Lillqvist wrote:
> > Stuart Parmenter writes:
> >  > I really think that checking in Visual Studio projects is the wrong
> >  > thing to do here.  We should just create a windows makefile that you
> >  > can use nmake to build, similarly to what glib, pango, etc do.
> >
> > But note that only for glib are these makefiles close to usable
> > without manual surgery AFAIK. Surely it is next to impossible to
> > create a ready-to-use makefile for nmake for the libraries with more
> > complex dependencies.
> Why do you think GLib is in any way special? Because it get's the most
> bug reports of breaking the msvc build?
> 
> GLib alrady adds gettext (libintl) and iconv to the dependency stack.
> Pango adds nothing. Atk adds nothing. Gdk-pixbuf adds at least libpng
> and thus zlib. Gdk adds wintab. Gtk adds noting anymore. [1]
> 
> > And maintaining such is a pain.
> Constantly failing with auto*tools is - for me - a bigger pain. And
> debugging via printf instead of with an integrated GUI doubly so.
> 
> > (I certainly am
> > not going to provide any msvc makefiles for the modules that are being
> > ported to Windows as part of the Evolution porting effort (ORBit2,
> > GConf, libbonobo, libbonoboui, libgnome etc.))
> >
> Having to maintain a complete parallel build environment sure isn't ideal.
> But ignoring the contributions (and needs) of developers coming from the
> windoze site isn't either.
> 
> > (But then, cairo has relatively few dependencies, so for cairo a
> > separate manually written nmake makefile probably might make sense.)
> >
> Really?
> For PS you need zlib.
> For PNG add libpng.
> For PDF there is the whole freetype/fontconfig stack required (at the
> moment). And last but not least the not optional libpixman dependency.
> 
> When I count expat (dragged in by fontconfig) Cairo has a very similar
> dependency count as Gtk+ (pre Cairo).
> 
>         Hans
> 
> -------- Hans "at" Breuer "dot" Org -----------
> Tell me what you need, and I'll tell you how to
> get along without it.                -- Dilbert
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