Re: [Adonthell-devel] More Windows porting

[Alexandre Courbot]

> Allright, I'll now try to compile/link against Python, gettext and
> freetype. AFAIK, most of them are available from GnuWin32, so we won't
> need to go far to have DLLs.

Well, so far it's going well!

Freetype 2 compiled like a charm. Haven't run any extensive test yet,
because I can't compile and link to the whole toolkit yet - but using
Wine I have been successfully able to initialize the library.

About gettext, we include our own in our package, so I guess this is no
problem at all.

More funny is with Python - it's not really designed to be
cross-compiled, but I however managed to get an interpreter running.
Better, it even runs under Wine! :) Very funny to see - and that way I
learnt a bit on Python initialisation. It starts by loading the site.py
module (which it couldn't find at first, of course). This module will
then import sys (internal module, no py file) and os.py, which sets some
os specific stuff. So site.py and os.py should be included for proper
initialisation (the interpreter can live without them, but let's do
things properly).

My interpreter still wasn't happy after I fed him with these modules
though, because sys didn't contained any OS-specific part (Windows
specific, in this case). And I've been unable to include them. Well,
nothing serious though, the most important is that I've been able to
successfully get these to (almost) work. 

So far, my test program has been compiled with the gfx module wrappers.
Although the interpreter doesn't initialise as it should, it's still
perfectly usuable and I've been able to run some statements: insert the
correct path to load the gfx module, load the gfx module, run a dir() on
it (which printed all its symbols) and call some safe functions like
screen_height (as SDL doesn't work with my Wine for now - I'll probably
get WineX soon) which worked without problem. Everything worked
perfectly. So the rest should follow, I think.

I think I'll join the Python list and try to find an already-compiled
version of Python for mingw32 (I have been unable to find one on the Web
- all the Windows binaries comes packed into an .exe installer), which
would fix the minor issues and be sure to be safe.

Strangly, I had none of the linking issues we had before. Not that I
complain :)

This is the status so far. Once I get something more complex and
complete to work, I'll adapt our configuration system so we can produce
Windows binaries easily. And of course I'll ask you to test :) We'll
also have to discuss issues related to Python modules, data directory
and so on. We can't force the users to put adonthell in
c:\games\adonthell otherwise the game won't work - we have to find
something wiser.

Alex.
-- 
http://www.gnurou.org