Re: [Mingw-msys] Porting GNU programs

[Paul M. <gu...@mo...>]

On Wed, 17 Apr 2002 18:29:09 -0400, Earnie Boyd <ear...@ya...>
wrote:

>Paul Moore wrote:
>>=20
>> This may not be entirely appropriate for the list, but I'm not sure
>> where I'd find a better audience for this sort of question. Apologies =
if
>> this is off-topic.
>>=20
>> I'm working on ports of some of the GNU utilities (diffutils at the
>> moment). There are some definitions in a "system.h" header, which are
>> documented as default values, which can be overridden in config.h. Now=
 I
>> have override versions appropriate for Win32, but I can't patch =
config.h
>> to include them, as that is a generated file.
>>=20
>> At the moment, I'm patching my definitions in at the top of system.h,
>> but I wonder if there is a better place? Is it possible to add defines
>> somewhere (config.hin?) so that they get included in config.h when it =
is
>> built?
>>=20
>
>This is an autoconfiguration question, probably best asked/researched on
>aut...@gn..., however, I'll give it a shot.  The best place to
>modify what happens with autotools is within the m4 scripts.=20
>Acinclude.m4 is included by autoconf before creating configure from
>configure.in so your hacks should go into acinclude.m4.  However,
>currently autotools aren't yet functional for MinGW/MSYS, albeit, I'm
>working on it.  There is an online book on the autotools suite at
>gnu.org.  If you have Cygwin installed you could also look at the info
>files for autoconf and automake.

Thanks. That's quite helpful - in a way. I had a horrible feeling that
in order to "do it right" I'd need to get involved with the autoconf
stuff. However, I have neither the time nor the inclination to deal with
that, as frankly it's way beyond anything I'd ever need. All I want is a
patch which I can apply to the existing tarball, and then configure/make
to get the executables. If I hack the autoconf stuff, I'm looking at
rebuilding configure every time.

And so far, my (limited) attempts at trying to get any interest on the
gnu newsgroups for taking Windows-related patches has been unsuccessful.
Add to that the very slow rate of new releases, and I'd be looking at
maintaining any independent patch for quite a while...

I'll probably just stick with my current adhoc approach.

Thanks for the help, though,
Paul.