Re: [Groff] Re: MSVC Port

[Keith Marshall]

On Friday 28 November 2003 11:13 am, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> > > What exactly do you mean with 1.19.2?  The latest release is 1.19,
> > > and I assume that 1.19.1 identifies the curren CVS, right?
> >
> > Read twice, send once ...
>
> Your reply is probably something witty, unfortunately I don't
> understand it...

I read this as an allusion to the old woodworker's adage, "measure twice, cut 
once", i.e. it's better to check the measurements a second, before ruining 
the workpiece by cutting in the wrong place.  So, perhaps Jeff is saying that 
1.19.2 is a typo which he overlooked;  he dosen't say what he did mean, tho'.

> > My diff has the c option but not the u option.
>
> This is fine also.
>
> > >   Another fix is to set ac_executable_extensions to ".exe" (or
> > >   ".exe .cmd .bat" if you like) in your config.site.  That
> > >   variable was added for this exact purpose - not all Unixy shells
> > >   on DOS/Windows return true for 'test -x foo' if only foo.exe
> > >   exists.
> > >
> > > This is an undocumented feature of autoconf:
> >
> > Documenting it would help ...  However, even with this set, the test
> > fails.  configure finds cc (MKS front end to MSVC), but tries to run
> > b.out.
>
> I'll forward your results to the bug-autoconf list.
>
> > > My suggestion was to have a small predefined list of extensions
> > > (just ".exe", to be precise) to try if the compiler name without
> > > extensions doesn't work.  Let's see how (and when) the autoconf
> > > people will fix that.
> >
> > Seems reasonable enough, but it also should be simple enough to
> > discover the proper extension.
>
> What exactly do you mean?
>
> > > Just curious: If you say `CC=cl.exe' and `CXX=cl.exe' does it then
> > > work without a configure script patch related to EXEEXT?
> >
> > Yes, as does CC=cl and CXX=cl--for now this would seem the most
> > expedient workaround.
>
> So it seems the problem is the `cc' MKS front end.  Another
> experiment: Have you tried to move `cc' temporarily out of PATH so
> that autoconf finds `cl'?  Does it work then?

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).

>
>     Werner

Best regards,
Keith.