[Box Backup] Win32 port

[Ben Summers]

On 5 Dec 2005, at 13:43, Chris Wilson wrote:

[snip]

> I don't have any real objections to going along with Martin's  
> decisions, provided that the project files still work in VS and we  
> don't mind having inconsistent line endings between lib/win32 and  
> the rest of the project, but I would be interested to hear what  
> others think.

I think we should go with UNIX style endings whereever it does not  
cause problems with Win32. Otherwise SVN doesn't work terribly well  
with diffs.

>
> I would like to clean up the comments and line lengths before this  
> gets merged, since I'm certain you won't allow me to change them  
> afterwards :-) Any objections?

Cleaning up sounds good to me!

>
> I also see that Martin has removed boost from the project, but I  
> don't see any changes to the build files to replace the boost regex  
> library which Nick used.
>
> I think we must have regex support on win32. Would you have any  
> objections to including a copy of Henry Spencer's regex library?  
> [http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/regex-spencer.htm]
>
> The license is BSD-like with attribution clause, so we would have  
> to acknowlegde him in the docs, but apart from that I hope it will  
> not conflict with your license.

I do not want to include a regex library in the sources. I would much  
prefer to not include it at all when it's not available, and make it  
easy to include it when it is.


>
>> There are two parts to the Win32 port:
>>
>> 1) The actual porting effort.
>>
>> 2) Some extra features, for example, the dumping of state to disc.
>>
>> They should, perhaps be separated.
>
> I agree completely, and would like to go ahead and do so.

Great!

>
>> The most helpful approach might be to get the changes applied to a  
>> copy of trunk, and separating out the two parts. But that may be  
>> more work than it's worth. But if it's done line by 4700 lines,  
>> we'd make sure we don't lose any extra code.
>
> I will do that as well as I can, but reviews of my changes would be  
> greatly appreciated.

I have some time scheduled to review code.
>

[snip]

>> Having said that, MinGW might not be a bad way to go, as it should  
>> allow the existing build script to work, which, under the new  
>> autoconf stuff, might save a whole world of bother.
>
> Don't the existing scripts require a decent shell (>> cmd.exe) and  
> Perl? Then MinGW wouldn't be enough by itself, you would probably  
> need Cygwin to run them.

My scripts just need a working perl and something to start them off.  
autoconf obviously needs more.

>
> I'm looking at using a free (as in beer) Windows IDE called  
> Chinook, which comes with wxWidgets support and the MinGW tools. I  
> think it would be quite easy to auto-generate the Chinook project  
> file from Perl, maybe even a cmd.exe batch file would do it.

Sounds good to me.

Ben