MinGw port of gawkextlib (was: Extension packaging)

[Manuel Collado]

El 10/05/2022 a las 18:29, Andrew J. Schorr escribió:
> On Tue, May 10, 2022 at 06:52:19PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > ... how am I supposed to know
> > what gawkextlib is and how should I go about installing it?  INSTALL
> > is not specific to gawk-mpfr, README doesn't say anything about
> > dependencies, and gawk-mpfr.info to which README refers doesn't seem
> > to say anything at all about installation.
> [...]
> My initial instructions were sloppy. They should have said:
>
> wget https://sourceforge.net/projects/gawkextlib/files/gawkextlib-1.0.4.tar.gz
> tar xf gawkextlib-1.0.4.tar.gz
> cd gawkextlib-1.0.4.tar.gz
> ./configure && make && make check && make install && echo Success.
> cd ..
> wget https://sourceforge.net/projects/gawkextlib/files/gawk-mpfr-1.1.0.tar.gz
> tar xf gawk-mpfr-1.1.0.tar.gz
> cd gawk-mpfr-1.1.0
> ./configure && make && make check && make install && echo Success.
> [...]
> But I am curious as to whether you can get this to work on MinGW if you're
> willing to waste a few more minutes on this.

I'm afraid building gawkextlib on MinGw requires more than few minutes.

Last year I was able to port most gwakextlib extensions to MinGw. But 
the porting process was really tricky. The result is available at:

    http://mcollado.z15.es/xgawk/win32/

The first attempt choked on the lack of a recent version of autotools on 
MinGw. The workaround was to do the port in two steps. The first on a 
Unix-like platform and the the second on a MinGw/Msys environment. Of 
course, the port also required a collection of patches. In brief:

(1) On a Unix/Linux environment:
- Compile, link, test and generate a new source tarball, without install:
    WANT_AUTOMAKE=1.11 autoreconf -i && \
    ./configure --with-gawk=... --with-gawkextlib=... --prefix=... && \
    make && make check && make dist

(2) On a MinGW+Msys environment:
- Unpack the tarball and repack as a .zip archive.
- Ensure you have MinGw binaries of gawk and the gawkextlib base library 
on c:/gnu
- Compile, test and install (on c:\gnu):
    ./configure --prefix=/c/gnu --with-gawk=/c/gnu 
--with-gawkextlib=/c/gnu && \
    make && make check && make install

(3) The final step was to generate a binary distribution archive. Mostly 
a manual operation.

Hope this can clarify things. Do not hesitate to ask for details, if 
there is some interest on this work.

Regards.
--
Manuel Collado - http://mcollado.z15.es