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[Help-liquidwar6] MinGW port

From: Christian Mauduit
Subject: [Help-liquidwar6] MinGW port
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:57:51 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla-Thunderbird 2.0.0.9 (X11/20080110) 
Hi,
Just for you to know, I managed to install and/or compile all the LW6 pre-requisite on a MinGW/MSYS environment, that's to say, the hardest part for a Microsoft Windows port has been done. The LW6 code itself needs to be modified now (there are always differences, at least the way to link to OpenGL is different, and sockets are a serious issue) but, since this is not my first port of this type, I'm confident it will work.
Just thought some of you on this least might be interested by this information.
Attached the procedure to set up a working environment, just to give you an idea of how simple and straightforward it is... 

Have a nice day,

Christian.

--
Christian Mauduit <address@hidden> - http://www.ufoot.org/ ___ __/\__
Liquid War 6 - http://www.gnu.org/software/liquidwar6/     / _")\~ \~/
"Les amis de la vérité sont ceux qui la cherchent et non _/ /   /_ o_\
ceux qui se vantent de l'avoir trouvée" - Condorcet     (__/      \/

Next: Coding guidelines, Previous: About mod-gl, Up: Hacker's guide

3.4 Compilation tips

3.4.1 Advanced ./configure options

Todo...

3.4.2 Microsoft Windows port

This section describes how to compile the game from source under Microsoft Windows. Note that players are encouraged to use a free system such as GNU/Linux, which is the platform Liquid War 6 is being hacked on by default. If you encounter problems with this port, you'll probably save time by installing a double-boot with GNU/Linux coexisting with your previous Microsoft Windows install.

Basically, Liquid War 6 requires MinGW. More precisely, it requires MSYS. A standard Cygwin installation won't work, because it is too UNIXish to allow third party libraries like SDL to compile natively. You might argue that SDL is available for Cygwin, but in reality, the Cygwin port of SDL is a MinGW port. Indeed, Cygwin brings all standard POSIX functions including the use of main instead of WinMain and I suspect this is a problem for graphical libraries like SDL which do require some sort of direct access to the OS low-level functions. Therefore, MinGW is more adapted for it does not define all these functions, and allows any library to hook on Microsoft Windows internals directly. Point is then, you also loose the cool effect of Cygwin which is to have a complete glibc available, including network functions like select defined the POSIX way, and not the WinSock way. If you ever ported code from POSIX sockets to WinSock 2, you know what I mean. Using MinGW is also embarassing for some libraries won't compile easily, and for instance programs which heavily rely on a real TTY interface to work are usually hard to port. This includes ncurses and GNU readline. Liquid War 6 tries to have workarrounds for all this, and in some cases the workarround is simply that embarassing code is not compiled on Microsoft Windows. For this reason, some features are not available on this platform. Period.

Now the reason you need MSYS and not only MinGW is that MSYS will allow ./configure scripts to run, and this eases up the porting process a lot. MinGW and MSYS packages are downloadable on the SourceForge MinGW download page.

To compile Liquid War 6, first download and unzip all the following files in the same directory, for instance C:\MSYS.

This file list might contain file which are not absolutely mandatory for Liquid War 6, for instance the Fortran 77 compiler is absolutely useless, but installing it won't harm either. Some packages might unzip things the right way, but some do it in a subfolder. You might need to run commands like: 

     cp -r coreutils*/* .
     rm -rf coreutils*

It's also mandatory to move everything that has been installed in /usr or /usr/local to / since MSYS has some builtin wizardry which maps /usr on /. You need to do this if you don't unzip files from a MinGW shell, which is obviously the case when you first install it. Usefull command can be: 

     cp -r usr/local/* .
     rm -rf usr/local

There's also a quirk with Guile which requires some configuration. You need to modify the following lines in /include/libguile/scmconfig.h: 

     #define SCM_HAVE_SYS_SELECT_H 0 /* 0 or 1 */
     #define SCM_HAVE_IEEEFP_H 0 /* 0 or 1 */
     #define SCM_HAVE_WINSOCK2_H 1 /* 0 or 1 */

Another step is to edit /etc/profile and add lines like: 

     export CFLAGS=-I/usr/local/include
     export LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib

Finally, your MSYS environment is (hopefully...) working.

Now you need to compile the following programs, from source, like if you were under a POSIX system:

To be continued...

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