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From: Kaz Kylheku <643-408-1753@kylheku.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Python recompile
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2025 18:15:16 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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Message-ID: <20250310110546.850@kylheku.com>
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On 2025-03-10, bart <bc@freeuk.com> wrote:
> On 10/03/2025 11:45, Waldek Hebisch wrote:
>> bart <bc@freeuk.com> wrote:
>
>>> Oh dear, that hasn't worked either.
>> 
>> Hmm, it AFAICS worked.  That is you wanted build failure and you
>> got build failure.
>
> In last year's thread I did an experiment with I think 5 projects, and 
> most failed to build using the provided tools.

If you're building cross-platform programs that come from Unix
environments on Windows, you're probably in for some pain.

Windows is often treated as a special case. The project developers
themselves take it on to produce builds for Windows users.  There is
often an assumption that Windows users will just be using the prebuilt
binaries.

The steps to build those binaries might just be something that works on
their machine. There may be manual steps involved that are not even
documented.

Compiling programs for Unixes used to be the same mess. What has changed
in the last 30 years is the emergence of free software distros which
do packaging. The main consumers of source code became these distros.

Authors of free software care that their stuff works with distros,
and for that they have to make it easy for the package maintainers
to build their stuff.

So you have a situation where projects care that their stuff is
easy to build by people who are packaging it for Debian, Fedora,
NixOS and whatever else ... we can include Cygwin here! Whenever they
make a new release, these downstream distros pick it up and take care of
packaging it.  And then they also have a native Windows port, which they
take care of packaging themselves. Since there is no downstream package
maintainer who has to be able to reproduce the Windows build work,
someone trying to step in and do that might have various interesting
experiences, and might need help from the project.

-- 
TXR Programming Language: http://nongnu.org/txr
Cygnal: Cygwin Native Application Library: http://kylheku.com/cygnal
Mastodon: @Kazinator@mstdn.ca