I don't think we should maintain a Windows make hierarchy, at least not manually. If we have to ship Windows makefiles they should be generated from the Wine makefiles (or both types of makefile generated from some other source file). Asking people to keep two hierarchies in sync won't work.
I'm relatively neutral on the tests vs. dlls issue, and so I'm willing to defer to your judgement.
However, I think it's critical that this process somehow be set up to be trivial for use by a Windows geek. And requiring the Cygwin tool chain on Windows defeats the whole purpose. For example, I here at home have nothing but a totally brain dead Win98 partition. No compilers, nothing. (Okay, Diablo II, but that's it).
For me, at a minimum, I need to have a precompiled winetest.exe.
Ideally, we would have a 'winetest.zip' such that all I would have to do is install Perl, and then I'd have a nice set of sample test scripts I could run/modify/tweak to my hearts satisfaction. If I had a C compiler, I could also compile the C tests.
Hmm. What if I had a 'make export-tests' that created a template 'winetest.zip' file. Then I've just got to get a Windows winetest.exe file built and repackage the 'winetest.zip' file.
So, if we had *one* Windows machine with a full Cygwin/CVS/gmake toolchain, it could periodically build new 'winetest.zip' files and publish them as a separate download at winehq.com.
What do you think? If I extended your patch to add an export-tests target, would this be useful?
Jer