Re: [PATCH 0/2] Modernize header checks

[Russ Allbery]

Peter Rosin <address@hidden> writes:
> 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.

In that case I think Autoconf should continue probing for strings.h rather
than just defining HAVE_STRINGS_H.  If the header check has meaningful
results on a platform on which Autoconf is currently working, there
doesn't seem to be a reason to drop it, IMO.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>