[Gcl-devel] Configure and Mingw32 BFD and ANSI

[Mike Thomas]

Hi again.

The results of some work yesterday (forgot to press the send button while
running for the train yesterday arvo):


Greg:

After (partially) applying your gcl-devel email patch and changing the bfd
lib recognition code so that it worked under Mingw32, (it had previously
generated lib paths with colons which choked the configure sed script), I
was able to configure properly for BFD libraries.

I have added the file to CVS as "configure-new.ac", rather than interfere
with Camm's baby, which I will continue to work with until your new
"configure.ac" is done.


Camm:

THE BAD NEWS:

In answer to your questions of about a fortnight ago, unfortunately BFD fasl
doesn't work on Win32, complaining of corrupted memory.

Neither does the ANSI branch of the build system, which dies during loading
of "braid.o".  I have previously got around this problem by loading PCL
rather than compiling, but it is, never-the-less, not good.

I will try and trace these problems with gdb which I have recently managed
to understand a little better.  Unfortunately I don't understand the
internals of GCL at all well.

THE GOOD NEWS:

Luckily, Mingw32 "saved_gcl" built the traditional way seems to work well
and is still able to build Maxima!

BFD CONFIGURE

Is it really necessary for libbfd and libiberty to be detected in such a
roundabout way - given that configure "foo.c" actually links using
"-lbfd -liberty" (roughly line 311 in "configure.in")?  Surely the configure
script won't work unless those libraries are in the right place to start
with, in which case you might as well just set "BFDLIB=-lbfd" and
"IBRLIB=-liberty".

In any case, I have set "configure-new.ac" to recognise a Mingw environment
and do precisely that, because the roundabout method just generates a
gigantic library path with colons which choke the configure sed substitution
script.



Cheers

Mike Thomas.