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

[Peter Bex]

On Sun, Aug 29, 2021 at 09:21:38PM +0200, Mario Domenech Goulart wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Fri, 27 Aug 2021 18:09:09 +0200 felix.winkelmann@bevuta.com wrote:
> > 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.

Alright, I'm convinced.  Attached is a patch to drop the damn thing.

> > 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.

True.  I have it running in a VM, but I always start it with a lot of
trepidation and I don't fully understand the OS itself.  For example,
suddenly now "make check" has started to give a "permission denied -
cannot delete read-lines.in" error where it's always worked before
and I have no idea why it can't delete it.

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

They all suck in their own way.  I'm kind of thinking maybe we don't
really need the cygwin build anymore now that there's WSL?

> * 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.

That's a catch-22 though: in order to get that help, we need CHICKEN
in a useful-enough state that people can use it on Windows.  And in
general, out of the total set of users, only a small subset will
actually contribute.

Cheers,
Peter

0001-Drop-custom-opendir-readdir-implementation-in-Window.patch
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