[Box Backup-dev] Win32 build

[Chris Wilson]

Hi Gary,

> Running Box under Cygwin is more of a Windows hack, rather than true 
> [Windows] platform support. I understand Cygwin was introduced at all in 
> 0.9, because a Windows port has not been completed. Now that we have 
> Nick's code, I think we should take advantage of it, and build native 
> Windows with VS2K5.

That's not what I meant. Building Box with MinGW (on Windows) requires 
Cygwin, but you don't need Cygwin to run it - it's a native build. That 
build process uses autoconf and Makefiles, and it seems unlikely that it 
could work without Cygwin, or else having been pre-run on a Unix box 
before distribution of the sources. Maybe MSYS is another option, I 
haven't tested it.

Personally, I do not want to distribute binaries built with VS2005 because 
it's a right royal pain in the posterior. Microsoft have just created a 
whole new kind of DLL hell, just for us. Fortunately, MiNGW allows me to 
escape this and distribute usable DLLs.

> What is the state of the native Windows version/build system?

I have built Box on VS2005, but it requires patches which are not yet in 
trunk (use /svn/box/chris/win32/vc2005-compile-fixes). It also requires an 
ugly hack of running a batch file (win32.bat) instead of "configure", and 
that batch file is not currently maintained and may go out of date, as 
Martin pointed out. I think we should try to auto-generate the VS2005 
project files and win32.bat as part of the release process.

Cheers, Chris.
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