Building Swarm under Cygnus. no good.

[pauljohn]

I promised I would check to see if I could build Swarm under the
cygwin32 distro.  It thought this was a good conceptually, but the
cygwin distribution has some pretty major drawbacks.

I've spent today looking at it, and since I'm a Linux user, I feel
that's a big enough investment for me. I ran into many hassles, the most
serious of which is that the gcc distributed by cygnus has the
objective-c support disabled intentionally. In the usenet I find people
talking about that problem, hoping it would be fixed, but I can't find
any new help from cygnus.  Their FAQ says go to hell:
http://cygwin.com/faq/faq.html#SEC80.  That's a deal breaker as far as
I'm concerned, because not willing to dig into the problems of
rebuilding that part of the gcc distribution from cywweenus, as I now
affectionately call it.  There is some chatter about downloading the
cygnus source for gcc, diddling a config/makefile, and rebuilding the
objc part.  I don't have the patience at the moment without a clear set
of instructions.  

I hope a windows user will look into this and tell us all what to do.  I
don't feel very confident that the "innocent new swarm want-to-be" who
has Cygnus will be confident to complete whatever silly gyrations the
Cygnus people force on us.

In case one of our windows users finds a way around that, here are my
other lessons.

In addition to Cygnus, one must install the XFree distribution on the
cygwin site.  I installed their version 4.1. This is necessary because
we need the xpm headers/development libraries.

I did find a binary/precompiled blt on www.tcltk.com/blt (the one for
tcl/tk 8.0)  but found a fatal flaw that it does not supply libBLT24,
but rather BLT24.lib.  I remember that problem from the old days, I
think the solution is ln -sf BLT24.lib libBLT24.a.  But I don't know for
sure because the swarm build crashes after a moment because there's no
gcc support for objective-c.

Before I found out about the objective c problem, I did work out a
configure command for swarm.

EMACS=//c/emacs-20.7/bin/emacs.exe ../swarm-2001-06-27
--srcdir=../swarm-2001-06-27 --with-defaultdir=/usr
--with-xpmincludedir=/usr/X11r6/include --with-bltdir=/usr
--with-tclscriptdir=/usr/share/tcl8.0 

The cygnus dist has the tcl/tk splattered about in weird ways, I think,
and I find it totally baffling that they install a directory structure
with /bin,  /lib, /usr and then they mount c:\cygnus\bin as /usr/bin. 
So its hard for me to see how files that are actually in
c:\cygnus\usr\bin will get found.


-- 
Paul E. Johnson                       email: address@hidden
Dept. of Political Science            http://lark.cc.ukans.edu/~pauljohn
University of Kansas                  Office: (785) 864-9086
Lawrence, Kansas 66045                FAX: (785) 864-5700

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