Warning: MinGW work underway

[Nicola Pero]

At FOSDEM people managed to convince me that we really need the Windows
port... :-)

So today I booted the Windows XP installed on my laptop and started
downloading MinGW stuff.

I also started reading about you are actually supposed to be building
DLLs, and ended up rewriting quite some stuff.

I ignored the pending Windows building patches as I was told there are
copyright assignment problems with them.  I wrote everything from scratch
without even reading them so there can't be any copyright problems ... but
I'll check them at the end of the work to make sure I have not forgotten
anything ...

... for now I just started rewriting.  It took a few hours to get things
building in what seemed to be the right way.  As soon as I could build
gnustep-base and link tools against it and run them and they worked, I
committed what I had, as I didn't want my local copy to drift for days
before committing, and the changes were starting to pile up.

I left the old DLL code in place because I can't test cygwin and so I left
cygwin using the old DLL code.  I believe cygwin should be no different in
that respect though ... so hopefully we can drop all the old code (that
would simplify things) in the end.  I suppose I'll install cygwin at some
point to check.

Warning: the CVS version is now probably unstable for MinGW.  Please
report problems if you find, and be patient.  I'll do more work on it in
the following days.

If you need a "stable" MinGW version which can compile GUI stuff please
download the CVS version of a few days ago ... I've not reached the GUI
yet. :-)

Anyway, I really like the way we're building gnustep-base now as we're
auto-exporting all symbols using the compiler.  Also, for most symbols of
most libraries the auto-exporting/auto-importing of symbols should mean
that you can just compile and use them without any change on Windows.  
That is cool :-)

Thanks.