Re: [Groff] Re: MSVC Port

[Werner LEMBERG]

> Just a thought.  While the combination of MSYS with MinGW perhaps
> seems more natural, (both are free software from the same stable),
> it could be interesting to try MSYS as an alternative to MKS, in
> conjunction with the MSVC compiler.  You probably wouldn't have as
> many *nix style tools, but it is sufficient to run configure and
> make, (the shell is bash, make is GNU make), and to create diffs,
> (with GNU diff).

Indeed, an interesting experiment -- but people are actually using the
MKS framework, so groff should compile cleanly (with none or only
minor alterations).

Ideally, I would like to support MSVC directly, but this requires a
lot of work.  My idea is to have a script file which creates the
necessary files for compilation (Makefile, config.h, etc.) instead of
executing the configure script.  This script should be run under Unix
(at `make dist' time), and output files should be placed into
arch/msvc to avoid cluttering the source tree.  The only prerequisite
for compilation with MSVC would be to have GNU make (and the necessary
binaries like gs or netpbm at run time).  Since I don't use Windows
this would be a volunteer's job.


    Werner