Re: [Plplot-devel] Trying ./configure on Windows via MingW

[Arjen M. <arj...@wl...>]

"Alan W. Irwin" wrote:
> 
> 
> Arjen, does the following overview describe what you are trying to do?
> 
> As I understand it, mingw consists of a minimal GNU environment including
> bash shell, make, and gcc compiler set that works fairly well for Andrew
> Roach on windows.  So are you trying to use the mingw shell and make, but
> substitute the windows visual C++ tools for the gcc compiler collection?
> 

Yes, that is right: I had MingW installed and have had reasonable
experiences
with it. So, I tried to run ./configure with CC set to cl. Apparently, 
./configure presumes that the C compiler can also drive the linker. That 
is not possible for the MSVC compiler. My first guess was and is that 
if I use a samll shell script that acts as the typical UNIX/Linux
compiler,
then ./configure will be happy to create the makefiles and all. 

> If so, just to confirm you have everything working properly for normal mingw
> with the gcc compiler collection, you may first want to follow Andrew's
> mingw instructions in INSTALL.
> 
> Once say the postscript device driver works for you under normal mingw with
> gcc, then Chapter 2.6 (which I quoted before) of the autotools book seems to
> indicate that if you substitute the visual C++ tools for the gcc compiler
> collection, everything should continue to work subject to dealing with
> cross-platform issues that might show up.
> 

That is why I thought ./configure would understand the capabilities of 
MSVC ...

> For example, the above configure output seems to indicate the visual C++
> compiler (cl) was found, but it has some limitations that have to be worked
> around.  google seems to be down at the moment, but I would look for that
> error message there to see if there is an obvious solution that does not
> require scripting on your part. Also, note that scripting on your part may
> not be a good workaround; libtool logic which may have certain things it
> tries to do for the case when CC=cl.exe.
> 

The shell script would _only_ be used in ./configure - not in the actual 
build steps - libtool will not see the workaround.

Regards,

Arjen