[GSOC]Firebird Integration Weekly Update 03

[Andrzej J. R. Hunt]

Hi everyone,

This week I've contined my work with getting Firebird to build, this
time on Windows using Cygwin and MSVS 11 (2012) -- this should hopefully
also enable it to run on MSVS 10 (2010), I'll confirm that once I have
it building successfully on 11. Unfortunately it's hard to tell just how
far through the build process I currently am, so no idea how much longer
this will take.

The most major stumbling block was that msvc trips up if you list the
compiler flags before the output and input file names. Once I finally
discovered that, significant portions of the build started to work,
however I'm currently having to update various includes and macros to
work with the latest MSVS.

I've also had to use the following (and similar variations) for msvs to
find the correct libraries for linking (within firebird):
#pragma comment(lib, "User32")
Is this acceptable or is there a better way to pass in the appropriate
libraries?

Also, msvc requires flags like -Fe (for executable files) and -Fo (for
object files) in place of -o for gcc -- I've just added some variables
(EXECUTABLE_OUTPUT_FLAG) etc. which are defined per platfom in the
makefiles -- is this acceptable? (The current state of the patch is
probably only usable on Windows with cygwin, i.e. I'd have to have it
apply for Windows only in gbuild as is the case for one of the python
patches -- I assume I'd eventually want it cleaned up so it could
hopefully be integrated into Firebird upstream though?)

Finally I've had to do things like replace snprintf with _snprintf --
currently decided using an ifdef -- this seems somewhat unclean but I'm
not sure of any better way to do this.

Cheers,

    Andrzej