Re: [PATCH 0/2] Modernize header checks

[Peter Rosin]

On 2013-06-01 08:09, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Peter Rosin writes:
>> On 2013-06-01 00:06, Russ Allbery wrote:
> 
>>> Autoconf doesn't work with MSVC directly so far as I know.  All of the
>>> packages I have that are ported to MSVC have a separate hand-written
>>> config.h that's used for MSVC builds, and in that file one simply
>>> doesn't define HAVE_STRINGS_H.
> 
>> What do you mean directly? MSYS can drive a build using MSVC as toolchain
>> (instead of MinGW) just fine. I do it all the time.
> 
> I meant in terms of being able to probe directly for a header file using
> the standard configure script, so I may be wrong.  You can currently get
> "checking for strings.h... not found" on Windows systems from the regular
> configure script?

That all works nicely, and libtool happily creates DLLs using MSVC etc etc.
The build infrastructure is generally not the problem, the WIN32 api and
the deficiencies in the POSIX jokes in "libc" are the much bigger problem.
You need MSYS and you need to convert the provided vcvars.bat file to a
shell script you can source from your MSYS bash, that's about it, and off
you go.

Personally, I much prefer to maintain only one build system for my
projects, so I would be very disappointed to be "forced" to maintain
a separate build system only for the sake of MSVC.

Cheers,
Peter