[aspell-devel] Re: Need Someone to Maintain Aspell Windows Port

[Kevin Atkinson]

[Resending, this time with address@hidden, for the record]

On Thu, 17 Apr 2008, Elizabeth M Smith wrote:

> Kevin Atkinson wrote:
> > > I have five compiler versions - VC6, 7, 7.1, 8 (2005) and 9 (2008) so
> > > take your pick. And yes the 2005 and 2008 versions are superior in
> > > standards support and binary speed and size but remember you'll have to
> > > deal with runtime distribution issues if you use anything but MinGW or
> > > VC6 - if you use MinGW you'll have to deal with the right flags so
> > > people who use VC6 can build against the libs.
> >
> > I am Windows ignorant.  Could you be more specific on "runtime
> > distribution issues"?
>
> The C runtime that windows uses is different for every compiler.  VC6
> (and mingw) link to MSVCRT.dll which is included with every windows OS,
> but this is old and buggy and insecure.  As MS released new compilers,
> they also released new runtimes - msvcr80.dll for example, is for the
> 2005 (VC8) compiler... only these are NOT included with the OS, you need
> to either distribute the runtime (which is legal even with open source)
> or point users to installers for the runtimes (freely downloadable from
> Microsoft).

Hum, I don't think that should be a major issue.  I would say build them 
with whatever compiler you think will would produce the best code as long 
as the binaries will work with Windows 98 or better (maybe Windows 95, 
but I think that is truly dead at this point).

> > > I don't, however, have time to deal with the libraries issue - you'll
> > > need another volunteer for that ;)
> >
> > What do you mean by "libraries issue"?
>
> sorry I meant dictionaries ;)

OK.  But it should be a fairly easy process.  Basically all you need to do 
is take is ".cwl" file and convert it into an Aspell dictionary (a ".rws" 
file), than install all ".rws", ".alias", ".multi" and additional data 
files defined in the info file (which is easy to parse) and install them 
in the correct location.  In the long run this will be easier than 
creating separate binaries for each dictionary.