autoconf in pure MSVC environment?

[Brandon J. Van Every]

How do I set up autoconf on Windows *without* any Cygwin or Mingw
compilers or header files?  I only want a native MSVC environment, with
typical mainstream Windows SDKs.  I don't want any UNIX environment at
all, except what autoconf itself must have to run.  i.e. a shell, get m4
working.  Would love to get rid of the UNIX shell if that's possible as
well, but I suspect it isn't.

Why bother in this way?

Typically, someone writes some 'great' code on UNIX that uses autoconf.
Then someone ports that code to a Cygwin or Mingw environment on
Windows, without too much trouble.  *Then* someone like me comes along
and tries to get rid of the project's UNIX dependencies.  Many apps
don't need UNIX dependencies, they just have them because that's where
the app was originally developed.

So, my goal here is a tool to aid in porting UNIX applications to
Windows.  If autoconf searches for a bunch of UNIX header files, and
barfs, that's good!  That tells me how trivial or impossible a project
is going to be to port.

I've tried to figure out "autoconf with almost no UNIX" before, but I
ended up scratching my head.  I thought this time, I'd ask for
suggestions.  If I could solve the problem, it would beat the heck out
of trying to manually configure for Windows for every damn project.
That kind of manual labor isn't worth it, when you're just trying to
determine how deep a project's UNIX roots run.


Cheers,                         www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

"We live in a world of very bright people building
crappy software with total shit for tools and process."
                                - Ed Mckenzie