Re: Making gnulib imports build on Windows

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Martin Stemplinger <mstemplinger@gmx.de>
> Date: Thu, 27 Jan 2011 21:32:35 +0100
> 
> > And those who hate cygwin can get gnuwin32.
> 
> Gnuwin is needed anyway if you want image support. So at least for me
> it would be no big deal to install also the sed package from gnuwin to
> build. But I only talk about the windows build on XP, vista and
> windows 7 not about the MS-DOS build that Eli also maintains. Things
> may be completely different there.

Things _are_ completely different with the MS-DOS port: Sed is already
required to build it.  And, unlike with GnuWin32, the DOS
(a.k.a. DJGPP) port of Sed is rock-solid and up to date (as generally
are all the other DJGPP ports of GNU software).

As for requiring Sed for the Windows build: those who don't mind
installing it will be at advantage, in that they will be able to
regenerate getopt.h whenever a new version of getopt.in.h gets
imported from gnulib.  Those who don't have Sed will have to wait for
someone who does to update the repository with the regenerated files.

> E.g. make dist is currently broken because some of the
> files like BUGS, COPYING, README, INSTALL are not copied to the
> install dir. At least I alsways need to copy those manually after make
> install for make dist to succeed.

Please submit bug reports about any such omissions, thanks.

> > I have made this suggestion in the past and I know that Eli does not
> > like it. However, I am making it again here so that in a few years, when
> > Eli inevitably sees the light and relents, I can say "I told you so"
> > (provided I am still around :-).
> Eli has probably struggled a lot to get the various windows versions
> to work and I really appreciate this very much because it helps me to
> have the true editor also on windows. 

Thanks, but the credit is not mine to take.  The current build system
on Windows was done by others (see nt/ChangeLog), I'm just trying not
to break it ;-)