Re: Gmake UTF-8 Support?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2021 17:41:22 -0700
> From: "Kaz Kylheku (gmake)" <729-670-0061@kylheku.com>
> Cc: nobozo@gmail.com, help-make@gnu.org
> 
> Yes, the above may have been the situation a quarter century ago,
> when the library in the Windows system folder was actually a copy of
> some then-current MSVC run time.
> 
> (Raymond Chen's insider article, which I already cited, explains
> the whole history and the status quo. The library used in Windows
> became a separately maintained fork, which was turned into a system
> component which is not documented (a claim explicitly made in the
> article, using that wording, pretty much!) But here, I entirely
> repeat myself.)
> 
> Without a question, ancient sources and documentation from ancient
> versions of the SDK will likely closely match what is in the MSVCRT.DLL
> binary of old versions of Windows from around the same time.
> 
> > Ha-ha, very funny.  I guess there's then a lot of us "unprofessional"
> > types that do that.  Look around for native Windows ports of GNU
> > software, and you will find that they all were compiled by MinGW and
> > link against MSVCRT.DLL.  Starting with Git for Windows, for example.
> 
> Yikes! I installed this on a Windows box just to take a look. Even
> though Git for Windows is now based on the newer MinGW-W64, I see with
> the help of the Dependency Walker utility that, indeed, this newer
> incarnation of MinGW is still linking the executables to
> C:\Windows\System32\MSVCRT.DLL.
> 
> I don't rely on this stuff myself, phew!
> 
> Its existence isn't so much a problem as, I suspect, that
> the majority of the user base is not informed about the issue.

There is no issue.

The legal aspects of linking GPL software with MSVCRT.DLL have been
examined long ago, and the examination concluded that doing so is
perfectly kosher.  All native MS-Windows ports of GNU software use
MinGW as the Free Software development environment for producing
native MS-Windows executables.  This includes all the major GNU
packages: Emacs, GCC, GDB, Binutils, Make, Texinfo, Guile, and many
others.  All of those ports cannot support UTF-8 encoded file names,
unless they provide that support on application level, because
MS-Windows still doesn't allow that to happen transparently when using
any of the MSVC-related C runtime libraries, including, but not
limited to, MSVCRT.DLL.

And with that, I'll respectfully bow out of this discussion.