I agree. And what is really hard is so often WIN32 is treated as equivalent to MSVC or DJGPP which complicates porting to Windows using gcc considerably. Often, it is safer to -UWIN32 and compile it as a Unix program, AKCL was ported to dos as a unix program years ago, which greatly facilitated porting GCL to msys today. But for a program that uses DIR and htonl like Perl, it is not possible to use the unix versions of that part of the code. I do appeal to programmers to name your defines carefully, if something only applies to DJGPP, then say #ifdef __DJGPP__ instead of #ifdef WIN32 in the source code. This procedure allows porting a unix program to multiple WIN compilers. For an example that I personally worked on, check out bladeenc system.h. It allows you to compile with MinGW as __GNUC__ or Borland or MSVC. Stephen from Minnesota (as I said when working on bladeenc) ----- Original Message ----- From: "H. Merijn Brand via RT" <perlbug-followup@perl.org> To: <stecmccarthy@hotpop.com> Sent: Friday, January 28, 2005 8:41 AM Subject: Re: [perl #33948] configure checking echo > On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 09:30:44 -0500, John Peacock <jpeacock@rowman.com> > wrote: > >> Andy Dougherty wrote: >> >> > What is 'msys' ? That might explain the '.exe' suffix. >> >> msys is the Minimal System for MinGW: >> >> http://www.mingw.org/msys.shtml >> >> I haven't had that much luck with it; CygWin is better maintained. It >> does have the ability to create native Win32 apps that don't have >> dependencies on other libraries. YMMV > > And how does it compare to DJGPP, which I experienced as a nightmare. > > -- > H.Merijn Brand Amsterdam Perl Mongers (http://amsterdam.pm.org/) > using Perl 5.6.2, 5.8.0, 5.8.3, & 5.9.2 on HP-UX 10.20, 11.00 & 11.11, > AIX 4.3, SuSE 9.0 pro 2.4.21 & Win2k. http://www.cmve.net/~merijn > Smoking perl: smokers@perl.org, perl QA: http://qa.perl.org > reports to: smokers-reports@perl.org, perl-qa@perl.org > >Thread Next