[wgcc-dev] Wgcc 2.0.2 released.

[Duft M. <Mar...@sa...>]

wgcc is a cross-compiler tool primarily written for Microsoft's Interix.
Its primary purpose is to produce native Windows binaries (internally
using the Microsoft Tool chain), and to mimic the behaviour of the GNU
compiler collection. This means that wgcc understands many of GCC's
command line arguments, and in most cases delivers the same results as
expected, sometimes manipulating the underlying tool's input and output.

Even though wgcc was written for Interix only, it can be used on native
Windows (without Interix), and other Systems, like Cygwin. The only
restriction is that on Platforms other than Interix, only Windows style
paths are understood. With the release of version 2.0.1 this changed.
Now Cygwin too is able to convert paths correctly. On Interix (and now
Cygwin) wgcc automatically converts UNIX style paths to Windows style
ones (i.e. /wgcc to C:\SFU\wgcc).

wgcc abstracts away lots of inconveniences that are introduced by
building static libraries, shared libraries (DLL's) and executables with
any possible combination of those three. When using wgcc both static and
shared libraries behave exactly the same on Windows, and this makes tons
of defines unnecessary. The only thing that still has to be done is to
give all Data symbols (i.e. Variables) an import attribute
(__declspec(dllimport)) when using them (i.e. in the library header
files) in an executable. For a simple example take a look at the file
tests/shared.test inside the wgcc distribution.

In release 2.0.2 there are again some big changes: wgcc now recognizes
debug information in object files built using Visual C++ 2005. In this
version Microsoft does not output line number information anymore, on
which wgcc relied. The handling of Directories (Include directories,
Library directories) has been fixed. There was a small bug when
validating a directory. In version 2.0.1 .wgccrc defined _DEBUG in debug
builds. This is not the case anymore, now the pxwc.h header file defines
_DEBUG whenever using the pxwc memory profiler (PXWC_MEMORY_PROFILER is
defined). The context dump behaviour in verbose output has been fixed.
In version 2.0.1 the context was only dumped when all tasks succeeded.
Now the context gets dumped anyway, regardless of compilation success.
As of 2.0.2 the expand-paths feature is enabled by default in .wgccrc.

The handling of preprocessed files was improved in 2.0.2. In earlier
versions wgcc treated preprocessed sources the same as any other source
file, which is wrong, since the library-header header file (normally
pxwc.h) was included twice.

Since 2.0.2 wgcc is known to work with ccache and distcc, which brings
great performance improvements in some cases, an For d allows for
distirbuted compilation over networks. For more information on how to
build and use those two packages, feel free to contact mduft.

Since a few days, http://interix-wgcc.sf.net is finally online. It's
only a very small page, so that there is not an empty directory listing
anymore. Additionally while designing the web page, a new logo was
created, which can be seen on the homepage and the documentation front
page.

The pxwc library stayed mostly the same, except that it now provides a
"sleep" function. As written above, pxwc.h now defines _DEBUG whenever
PXWC_MEMORY_PROFILER is defined. This should be the only case when one
needs the debug runtime from Microsoft.

To continue improving wgcc and pxwc packages, we now need your help in
testing them. Please download wgcc and try to compile your software
using it. If something goes wrong please contact mduft or open an issue
using the Sourceforge Tracker at
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=3D158081&atid=3D806404, or ask =
your
questions at the forums at
http://sourceforge.net/forum/?group_id=3D158081.

You can browse the Subversion Repository here:
http://svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/interix-wgcc/trunks/

Documentation can be found here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3D158081&package_id=
=3D
203917&release_id=3D446943
Source Packages can be found here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3D158081&package_id=
=3D
177049&release_id=3D445894
The Patch for Libtool can be found here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3D158081&package_id=
=3D
196163&release_id=3D446510