Re: <dirent.h> on msvc

[John W. Eaton]

On 28-Apr-2010, Bruno Haible wrote:

| The way to do that is that you provide a good implementation of said
| functions opendir, readdir, and closedir.

Sure, I understand that.  Sorry if my earlier message sounded like I
was expecting someone else to do this part.

| Projects that use gnulib have to overcome three hurdles when using MSVC
| (as opposed to mingw):
|   1) They have to have a way to execute shell scripts and execute
|      Unix-style Makefiles. Not 'nmake'. Some people may use MSYS for this.
|   2) They have to have a wrapper around the compiler that understands
|      the common options (-o, -c, -E etc.). Some people use scripts called
|      'cccl' or 'cccl2' for this.
|   3) They have to make sure that the installation program for the binaries
|      does NOT install any Microsoft binary-only component, because that
|      would be a violation of the GPL. (I think the binaries of GNU Octave
|      did that at some time.)
| 
| All these obstacles are nonexistent when projects use mingw.

Yeah, I encourage people to use MinGW.  But we have some people who
for one reason or another want to use MSVC to build Octave.  They are
currently using MSYS to run the normal GNU build environment, but with
a wrapper script for MSVC.  As for the third point, yes, there was a
binary package of Octave that had this problem, but it is no longer
available and as far as I know, there are no plans to distribute
binaries that have this problem in the future.

jwe