Re: Cross-platform availability of header files

[Peter Rosin]

On 2013-03-15 21:18, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> On 2013-03-15 9:14 AM, Peter Rosin wrote:
> 
>> I just wanted to chime in with the fact that it's working just fine to
>> use one of said UNIX-like portability environments and have Autoconf
>> probe MSVC directly.
> 
> This is relevant to my interests ;)  How do you smooth over the
> differences in command line interface between 'cc' and 'cl'?

The 'compile' script from (modern) Automake is good enough and 'depcomp'
has modes to support MSVC. There is also the 'ar-lib' script from the
same source that wraps lib.exe to support basic archival operations
in much the same manner.

> (Can you make it work in the presence of libtool?)

Yes, libtool with MSVC in MSYS (or in Cygwin, but that is more alien)
works just fine.

I tend to use something like this:

.../configure \
  CC=cl \
  CFLAGS=-MD \
  CXX=cl \
  CXXFLAGS=-MD \
  LD=link \
  NM="dumpbin -symbols -headers" \
  AR=lib \
  STRIP=: \
  RANLIB=:

It the package doesn't have AM_PROG_CC_C_O in its configure.ac it
might be needed to say CC="/path/to/compile cl", and sometimes it
might be good to say CC="cl -nologo" (since the "logo" boilerplate
is dumped on stderr and any output on stderr from the compiler is
suspect). Similarly for AR=lib vs AR="/path/to/ar-lib lib" if the
package doesn't have AM_PROG_AR.

Libtool knows about using dumpbin as symbol lister, but if the
build uses $NM directly from some Makefile (or otherwise) it gets
tougher, as the wrapper is implemented "internally" in libtool.

Cheers,
Peter