[Enigma-devel] Windows MinGW/MSYS Development

[Ivan Wick]

Hi Developers,
I spent some time getting familiar with the Enigma source code and
getting a build environment set up on Windows XP.  I am using the
latest stable versions of MinGW and MSYS, and was working with
revision 1167 of the subversion trunk.  I have a few questions:

- Configure script in MinGW
I encountered a couple of problems with using the configure script to
compile under MSYS.  For instance, the following (configure.ac:174):

if test "$MINGW32" = yes; then
  AC_MSG_CHECKING([for Xerces 3.0 experimental version])
  AC_EGREP_HEADER([gXercesMajVersion = 3],[xercesc/util/XercesVersion.hpp],
      [AC_MSG_RESULT([found])],
      [AC_MSG_ERROR([not found])])
   AC_CHECK_LIB(xerces-c, main,,[AC_MSG_ERROR([xerces is required to
compile Enigma])])
else

will make the generated configure script fail on MinGW when not using
Xerces 3.0 expeimental version.  I was able to get it working with
Xerces 2.8 after commeting this out.  Should this be changed?

The code relies on libcurl, which was also not detected under
MinGW/MSYS without the following change (configure.ac:203), because
the libcurl development binary I downloaded (libcurldll instead):

dnl ----------------------------------------
dnl Check for libcurl
dnl ---------------------------------------
if test "$MINGW32" = yes; then
    AC_CHECK_LIB(curldll,curl_global_init,,[AC_MSG_ERROR([libcurl is
required to compile Enigma])])
else
    AC_CHECK_LIB(curl,curl_global_init,,[AC_MSG_ERROR([libcurl is
required to compile Enigma])])
fi

I didn't want to submit a diff straight away because this is the first
time I have set up this build environment on Windows and I am not
certain if it am correctly differentiating between errors in
configure.ac from any errors I might have made in setting up
MinGW/MSYS.  Have any Windows developers had similar experiences?

- Visual C++
Trunk has a VisualC directory in it with project files, etc, but it is
outdated.  What is the current status of using Visual C++ to compile
Enigma?  Is someone working on getting it updated to the current
sources?  If not, I will make an attempt to get it working in Visual
C++ 9.0 Express Edition.

Ivan