#137 Source tarballs

[ofv]

I would like to package twapi for the MSYS2 project (https://sourceforge.net/projects/msys2/) This uses an automated build system that fetches the source code, builds and packages the software. However, twapi has no published tarball or zip file containing the source code.

Could you put a tarball or zip file with the corresponding source tree along the binary packages? Something like twapi-4.0.61-src.zip will do.

[Ashok P. Nadkarni]

I can put up a source zipfile but note that building with msys/mingw is currently not possible so it would not actually help you. You need Visual C++ and nmake.

/Ashok

[ofv]

Are there known incompatibities with gcc/MinGW, or is it that Twapi lacks makefiles for GNU Make?

[Ashok P. Nadkarni]

I have not tried with gcc so can't really talk of compatibility one way or another. To give you a bit of history, twapi used to be buildable with gcc/mingw up to V3.1. At that time it was a monolithic extension. The toplevel dir in twapi has the autoconf/configure scripts necessary (contributed by ActiveState)

For twapi 4.0, I broke out the monolithic extension into separate directories to make it more modular (you can build a subset of the twapi packages). Still not sure if that was a good decision or not but too late to change. In the process, I did not update the autoconf as I do not use it and do not have the cycles to grok the autoconf/configure system.

If you do not care about autoconf, but just want a Mingw/gcc based makefile structure, I believe it should not be difficult to do. In fact, I though gnu make supported an nmake compatibility switch?

In any case, to actually answer your question :-), I don't know of any incompatibilities and if any arise I think they should be fixable fairly easily. So my guess is it is more of just lacking makefile for gnu make (if you want to use autoconf that's a whole different story).

Note some startup scripts are now stored as resources in the twapi dll. I don't know if mingw has a tool to bind resources to executables.

I hope that helps or at least does not further muddy the waters :-)

[ofv]

Thanks Ashok for the extensive answer.

MinGW has windres for embedding resources into executables, so no problem there.

I'll put this in my TODO list and see if it is feasible to create a simple makefile or script compatible with GNU Make. It that's not the case, maybe CMake, which I'm familiar with, is a better option as it covers MinGW and VC++ (both NMake and IDE builds.)

[Ashok P. Nadkarni]

Only 11 years later ... twapi 5.0 has mingw support as well as tarballs available from its github repository.