Questions on Windows port/deployment of tool

[Michael Hopkins]

Hi all

We are making good progress with some command line tool development, created
on Apple/Cocoa/Xcode and then ported to Linux & Win32 with GNUstep -base and
-make using GNUstep environments set up on each platform.

We are deploying outside any GNUstep environment by putting the following
libraries (as well as any DLLs we create ourselves) in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32

  gnustep-base.dll
  objc.dll
  libiconv-2.dll
  libintl-2.dll
  zlib1.dll

...and this is generally working well, but the questions below are also
relevant within the GNUstep/MSYS environment created by the latest Windows
installer with GNUstep.sh sourced etc. So, the questions are:


1) Is there a way to printf() Unicode characters (i.e. other than the normal
ASCII set) in a console?  Currently, these characters that look fine on OS X
& Linux produce rubbish (but different rubbish) in the Windows Command
Prompt and MSYS pseudo-UNIX terminals.


2) The above may (or may not) have something to do with user defaults but
it's not easy to find out how to set these up or even if we need to for a
pure command line tool.  A previous post mentioned the GNUstep.conf file, so
we have created one in the directory with our application containing the
following entries: 
  
GNUSTEP_USER_CONFIG_FILE=.GNUstep.conf
GNUSTEP_USER_DIR=.
GNUSTEP_USER_DEFAULTS_DIR=:INTERNAL:

The last one is apparently a method of loading the users' Windows defaults
automatically.  Are we doing the right thing here?  All we really want is
standard things like language/fonts, time & essential environment variables
to be set correctly.

The presence of these lines in GNUstep.conf:

 GNUSTEP_SYSTEM_ROOT=/C/GNUstep/System
GNUSTEP_NETWORK_ROOT=/C/GNUstep/System
GNUSTEP_LOCAL_ROOT=/C/GNUstep/System

..doesn't appear to matter - I assume because copies of the essential DLLs
are already available in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 - and I would prefer not to
have to include them because we will almost certainly be deploying without
the full GNUstep environment.


3) This error message occurs on Win32 but not the other platforms - does
anyone know what it refers to?

  2007-03-28 14:47:55.583 test[2412] unable to set blocking mode - An
  invalid argument was supplied.


4) We have both static (.a) and shared (.dll) versions of a large library to
link in with the tools - we prefer to link with the shared one as it will
not change and should make the executables smaller.  Currently we tell
gnustep-make where to find both the libraries with:

  ADDITIONAL_LIB_DIRS =  -L$(GNUSTEP_USER_ROOT)/Libraries (etc.)

And that we want to link with

  ADDITIONAL_TOOL_LIBS = -lacml (etc.)

and then make with 'make shared=yes static=no'.  Is there anything else that
we need to do to ensure that the shared library is used for the link?


Thx in advance for any thoughts and please feel free to CC me

Michael


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