On 8/18/07, David Kastrup wrote:

"Thanh Han The" writes:

...

fwiw, I find msys http://www.mingw.org/msys.shtml a very useful thing anytime I need to do any shell scripting on windows.

I used to use msys and gnuwin32 tools, but now I find I prefer to run real linux in a VMware appliance so I have have current versions and avoid the little compatibility glitches. The free VMware player is easy to install and you can copy applicances around. Appliances can mount windows shares. Since the systems I'm using tend to be older hardware I find it better to use the existing Exceed or Xming session for the display rather than having two X servers running. Building pdftex in a VMware appliance running linux is quite practical.

Yes, but there is a bootstrapping problem when doing software installers. You can't use software until you have unpacked it...

I should mention that there are debian packages for the mingw cross-compiler. I don't have debian at home, so I use the archive from http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/Rtools/i586-cross-tools.tar.bz2. The compiler is quite old: $ i586-mingw32-gcc --version i586-mingw32-gcc (GCC) 3.4.5 (mingw special) I think pdftex builds with such old gcc on *x. Today I tried building pdftex-1.40.5 with this cross-compiler. There were some configure issues checking size of long... configure: error: can not run test program while cross compiling configure: error: ../../../src/texk/web2c/configure failed for web2c configure: error: ../../src/texk/configure failed for texk I got as far as tangleboot.o, but then encounter: i586-mingw32-gcc -o tangleboot tangleboot.o lib/lib.a ../kpathsea/.libs/libkpat hsea.a -lm ../kpathsea/.libs/libkpathsea.a(progname.o):progname.c:(.text+0x69): undefined reference to `_set_home_warning' This seems to refer to stuff from texk/contrib that isn't included with pdftex-1.40.5. One strategy that has worked in the past is to steal as much as possible (e.g., generated web2c sources) from a linux build. So you need the usual libraries and one additional library for Win32 compatibility/features. My experience from other projects has been that much of what you get from configure on linux stays the same using mingw, so rather than fighting the "can not run test program while cross compiling" issues it may be easier to manipulate the files generated on linux. I don't see the need to use similar hardware for the linux build as a significant limitation, although I suppose there will be interest in using OS X for Intel to build Win32 binaries. I suspect one reason the Win32 build systems have lagged is that until recently the performance benefits of commercial compilers were useful, so it didn't make much sense to invest effort in building with free tools. GCC code has been getting better, and the hardware is faster, so I suspect the advantage of a commercial compiler is no longer much of an issue. -- George N. White III Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia