On March 21, 2003 05:55 am, Nick Clifton wrote:
Just to be clear ... Dimitrie, please could you try Ian's patch and provide us with feedback as to how well it works. This would not violate copyright restrictions (provided that you do not post any code), and since you are actually using this tool, you are the one most like likey to be able to verify that the patch is working properly.
Well, certainly. To be honest, the situation is a bit more complicated. I haven't been doing any active work on the Mozilla port, my interest in the port is as a starting base for a port to Wine. This may sound odd, but for various reasons (of which just being cool is not least important), I'd like to compile the Win32 port of Mozilla under Wine in Linux.
Needless to say, such ports are not trivial, but I set out to make them a lot simpler, so that we make it practical for people to port their Win32 app to Linux via Winelib. To that end I started created a MinGW-compatible build environment in Wine. Thus, porting to Wine will become a two step process: first port to MinGW, then port to Wine. It is easy to see that this approach is a lot more evolutionary, and the steps are simpler. Moreover, you have intermediate working code (the mingw port) which is also very important, not to mention that smaller number of things that change from under you in each step (in the mingw port, you only have to deal with the build tools changing, while the wine port, given that I can provide mingw-compatible tools in Wine, it's just the OS that changes).
Ideally, if everything works according to the plan, the above process looks like so: A. Port MSVC/BCC app to MinGW 1. Create GNU Makefiles 2. Deal with difference between cl/bcc and gcc 3. Get working versions of the app under MinGW B. Port from MinGW to Wine 1. Copy source code to a Linux box, run dos2unix on it 2. Change #include directives from #include "some\dir\file.h" to #include "some/dir/file.h" 3. Change file/dir name capitalization to match the one on disk NOTE: Changed (2) & (3) are scriptable, and we already have a tool that takes care of them. Most importantly, they are portable between all ports so a common source code can be maintained. Needless to say, this is paramount, few people have the resources to maintain different sources.
4. Change the Makefile as follows: + ifndef WINE CC = gcc CXX = g++ WRC = windres + else + CC = winegcc + CXX = wineg++ + WRC = wrc + endif Again this change is portable between ports, so a common build system can be maintained. The winegcc/wineg++ tools already work, but they are not ready. They mainly lack -shared support for generating DLLs, but they already proved useful in porting a number of apps (http://24.103.33.114/wine/Winelib-Apps.html) or toolkits (http://www.dssd.ca/wine/Wine-Fun.html#wxwindows).
This should give people a better idea why I think command line compatibility between tools is important.
However, to get back to the topic of this message, I was interested in the Mozilla port to MinGW only as a starting point form my efforts toward a Winelib port. As such I haven't actually worked on it, so I don't have the environment handy to test the changes. I've posted the patch to the Mozilla bug, and hopefully someone will give it a try. If not, I'll test it, but it will take a little while to get everything up to speed. Another way is to post a test .rc file that was experiencing the problem before, would that be useful?