Re: Windows port (was Re: hey listen to this!!!!!)

[Stan Shebs <shebs at shebs dot cnchost dot com>]

"James R. Dunson" wrote:
> 
> At 07:15 AM 7/7/00 -0700, Stan Shebs wrote:
> >I take it the free version of cygwin is
> >problematic somehow?
> 
>   My ignorance is showing; the last I'd heard cygwin couldn't even
> compile itself (let alone a complex, multi-window, pseudo-real-time,
> networked game like Xconq), and seemed to be stalled in that state.
> I've just had a look at their site, and it seems to be in a much
> better state now.

Uh, yeah - Cygnus has been using cygwin routinely to ship cross-compilers,
IDEs, etc, since 1997, and since it's a key part of their infrastructure,
they have a pretty high commitment to make it work well.  As you can see
from the web site, cygwin has been used to port quite a few programs now,
and Cygnus/Red Hat has sold many copies of the boxed product.  (Yes,
even Red Hat; they're about open source in general, not just Linux.)

>   However... the Xconq site is certainly not helping here.  I don't
> see any mention of what compilers it compiles under, only limited
> discussion of OSs, no comments as to whether it needs optional
> packages or libraries, etc.  And the fact that there doesn't exist
> a downloadable executable version of the current final release
> suggests strongly to the casual observer that it is at the very
> least not easy to compile.

The real reason is my laptop is running Linux so nicely that I've
been putting off subjecting the disk to abuse by W98 crashes, but
you have a good point.  To me the web is still one of those newfangled
abuses of the Internet (such a waste of bandwidth!) :-) :-), and I
tend to focus on putting the docs into the source package; the file
INSTALL contains most of what I know about building the Windows version,
for instance.  It would be good to migrate some of that onto a
Web page, at least a pointer to the file with the real content.

>   Up until recently, a "Windows port" frequently meant that it could
> only be compiled using compilers that were very non-free (in either
> the beer or the speech sense); if Xconq can be gotten running from
> scratch on W95/98/NT/2k for nothing more than a few minutes of
> download time, the homepage should point this out, and ideally give
> some instructions and links (probably on a sub-page).

Check out the INSTALL file.  The build goes pretty smoothly on NT,
once you have cygwin installed and going.  Building on W98 seems
to entail a series of crashes and restarts, but it eventually
finishes there too (assuming your disk didn't get corrupted by
one of the crashes, grr.)

Stan