Re: CMake builds :)

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2023 16:05:26 -0500
> Cc: bug-gawk@gnu.org
> From:  Kuba Sunderland-Ober via "Bug reports only for gawk." 
> <bug-gawk@gnu.org>
> Mingw is *also* open-source - no less and no more than CygWin. At the
> moment, mingw builds are rather fragile.

That's not true.  MinGW comes with the MSYS, a set of programs,
including Bash and Coreutils, which allow running Posix configury
(a.k.a. "the autotools") almost the same way as one does on Posix
systems.  I routinely build a lot of MinGW ports that way, including
Binutils, GDB, Texinfo, Emacs, and many libraries whose binaries one
can find on the ezwinports site.  Gawk doesn't use the Posix configury
largely for historical reasons, but it could do that if we decided
that no non-Posix platform will ever be supported except MinGW.

> Getting them to work via cmake, under several build tools (ninja,
> gnu make, a few others), can only get it more robust.

If the configure script is well-written and doesn't make assumptions
that are false on Windows, there's usually no need for any other build
tool: neither CMake nor ninja nor anything else.  Sometimes minor
changes are required for the configure script, sometimes none at all.
I find myself in the need of using those other build tools only if the
project doesn't support autotools at all.  A prominent example is the
Boost library.

P.S. This all is really off-topic on this list.  I chimed in only to
set the facts straight about the general availability of build tools
for MinGW builds.  I suggest that we shut down this thread, as it has
nothing whatsoever to do with Gawk.  The Gawk maintainers have made a
decision long ago that they want to support MS-Windows ports, as long
as there are volunteers who provide that support (and I personally am
grateful for that decision, as I use Gawk every day).  Supporting
Windows ports when there are volunteers who do that is explicitly NOT
against the goals of the GNU Project, so raising this issue here is
redundant at best.