Re: patch for chicken on 64-bit windows (msys and mingw-w64)

[Mario Domenech Goulart]

Hi,

On Fri, 27 Aug 2021 18:09:09 +0200 felix.winkelmann@bevuta.com wrote:

>> My gut says we should just drop our custom version and rely on Mingw's
>> dirent.h , but that is a bigger change for the RC (but we can ask people
>> to test again of course) and would make supporting MSVC in the future a
>> bit more difficult again.
>> 
>
> Using the already provided implementation is preferable, I'd say - one way
> to shift responsibility, which, in this utter mess of Windows API, seems to be
> the only way forward.

I agree.

> Do we already have test results on all supported Windows platforms? I lost
> track.

I think we have a set of problems related to Windows, which is going to
be very hard for us to handle without help:

* As far as I can tell, none of the CHICKEN developers use Windows
  regularly.

* There are many combinations of Windows environments, leading to a
  great variety of ways to break stuff.

* We do not have automated tests on Windows.

As a start, it would be nice to collect the information we need in a
wiki page (e.g., which variants of Windows we want to/can support, how
they differ etc.).  At this point I'm lost at the combinations of
different Windows things that affect the build/execution of CHICKEN.

I'd say we need help at that so that we can improve support on Windows.

All the best.
Mario
-- 
http://parenteses.org/mario