Improving ncurses' win32 (_WIN32) port

[Ali Abdulkadir]

Hello,

I've been compiling ncurses with MSVC for a few months now and I wanted to give some feedback and/or exchange experiences.

1. Would it be possible to rename the __MINGW32__ and __MINGW64__ directives to the more common _WIN32  and _WIN64 preprocessor definitions? In ncurses_dll.h as well please.

Every toolchain on windows I know of understands it.

2. I was wondering how up-to-date the todo list in README.mingw is. For example, is widechar support production ready or still somewhat experimental?
And what about the suggested configure flags? Are they still our best bet.

3. Correct me if I'm wrong but I think getopt.h is only needed when  building the progs/samples and maybe the tests too.
It would be nice if the configure script wouldn't error if getopt.h wasn't found *and* if mentioned features are disabled.
Another way would be to ship a "standalone" getopt.h. If possible of course.

4. I would had shared build instructions for MSVC, but they are quite complex. I wrote a script to automate the process, but you'll still need good knowledge about Windows, the autotools and how/why they too often not get along very well.

My build steps are quite messy actually. I basically first configure and build with msys2, and then configure and build with MSVC without running any kind of "make *clean" in between. This is currently necessary because of the complexity of the build scripts with their many tiny steps to generate/move files around during compilation.

So is there a way to generate all needed files in some other (possibly autotools independent) way?

Thank you,

Ali Abdulkadir