Re: MinGw port of gawkextlib

[Andrew J. Schorr]

On Tue, May 17, 2022 at 08:36:01PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Tue, 17 May 2022 12:41:22 -0400
> > From: "Andrew J. Schorr" <aschorr@telemetry-investments.com>
> > Cc: eliz@gnu.org, mcollado2011@gmail.com, bug-gawk@gnu.org
> > 
> > I think the simplest solution is to keep the existing configure option
> > and add 2 more: --with-gawk-include-dir=DIR that tells us where to find
> > gawkapi.h and --with-gawk-program=PATH. Does that cover all of our bases?
> 
> I don't think --with-gawk-include-dir=DIR is necessary, certainly not
> for MinGW.  But if you prefer to have it, I don't mind, of course.

The patch is finished, so it's free of charge. How can it hurt?

> > But I think this is serious overkill. Nobody has ever complained about any
> > of this before, most likely because nobody uses these extensions anyway.
> 
> Yes, and I guess very few tried to build the extensions with MinGW for
> MS-Windows until now.

Agreed. Probably Manuel is the only one who tried until you did.

> The question is: do you want to have gawkextlib extensions to have a
> reasonable support of MinGW builds, including running the test suite?

That would be nice if it's possible without an insane amount of effort.

> If you do, then IMO you should provide a way for a user to tell the
> configure script which Gawk executable to use for run-time tests,
> because it is simply _impossible_ to run the test suite except by
> using MSYS tools, and if MSYS is being used, the default Gawk is the
> MSYS Gawk, which will never work for the test suite.  If such an
> option were not available, I'd have to hack test/Makefile by hand to
> force the test suite to invoke the correct Gawk.

I think I have now done that by adding the --with-gawk-program argument.

> IOW, the new --with-gawk-program=PATH option is required only for
> running the test suite of the extensions, and only on MinGW, so you
> could call it something like --test-with-gawk-program= or somesuch,
> and document it as a MinGW only option.  Users on Posix platforms will
> most probably never need that option.

I have changed the help string to say:

  --with-gawk-program=PATH
                          Use gawk program binary in PATH for running the test
                          suite, e.g. /usr/bin/gawk

Is that clear enough?

> > If the front-end installation script does its job properly, then this
> > entire discussion will be moot.
> 
> Not sure I follow: how can an installation script solve the problem I
> described above, which has to do with running the test suite of the
> extensions?

I think we've pretty much beaten this issue to death. The configure
scripts now have many options to deal with this, plus the configure script
will throw an error if it can't find gawkapi.h.

The challenge remains to create a front-end download/build/install script that
does the right thing in most cases, and has some options to enable it to handle
the situations that it's not able to grok by itself.

Thanks,
Andy