On Sunday 06 January 2008, you wrote:
> 2007/12/26, Kuba Ober <ober.14@osu.edu>:
> > On Sunday 23 December 2007, Adrien wrote:
> > > 2007/12/20, Kuba Ober <ober.14@osu.edu>:
> > > > I guess that Ocaml maintainers should just drop that Cygwin
> > > > requirement, and tweak their build process to work "out of the box"
> > > > with MSYS/MinGW.
> > >
> > > You shouldn't see cygwin as a _requirement_.
> > > Ocaml installation from source (let the binary distributions be a
> > > special case) use C. If there is no c compiler installed as it is
> > > under all windows installations (I mean right after setup is
> > > completed) ocaml simply can't be installed ; the problem is not with
> > > ocaml or cygwin but with windows. Cygwin is not a fancy requirement
> > > just one of the few ways to get a c compiler under windows.
> > >
> > > Also mingw without cygwin still lacks a lot of things. Capabilities
> > > are there but it seems header files have not been updated in ages and
> > > linker flags need to be different (you will often need -lws2_32 for
> > > many C apps especially).
> >
> > THe right way is to update mingw headers, submit to the maintainers, and
> > go from there. That's the OSS way.
>
> I know, I only lack of time to do this properly and I've been
> astonished to see some headers were older than Internet Explorer 5.5
> (or even 5) !
> It seemed to be the dev just didn't feel like updating the headers so
> it would take me some time to convince them with a nice and polished
> patch.
>
> > > Anyway, the result is a big headache for the developper. I perfectly
> > > understand the ocaml team is not willing to make a complete mingw/msys
> > > port ; it's such a mess.
> >
> > It's the only sane way to go. THere's no technical reason to require a
> > unix environment to build ocaml. Big applications build on Windows just
> > fine...
>
> Ocaml doesn't rely on an unix environment. It makes use of it when
> available though. How could you run a configure script on windows
> without msys|mingw|cygwin ?

You write it in something other than shell. Say in C++ or OCaml. Qt does just 
fine with configure written in C++/Qt. They even have a graphical front-end 
to it.

> The only solutions are else proprietary non-microsoft
> shells 

Nope. See above.

> About the windows build, it is already avoiding configure scripts but
> then the options are determined by the lowest common factor because
> since most of the required tools are not provided by windows (cc,
> headers), you can't be sure about what is available. But then the
> ocaml Makefile.nt files are already doing this.

Trolltech has approached that problem reasonably well. They provide a 
precompiled (executable) configure mechanism, and a few handmade makefiles to 
build their makefile-generator under the supported development environments 
(3 versions of Visual C++, Mingw gcc). After the makefile generator is built, 
it creates native makefiles which work either in Microsoft's nmake, or under 
Mingw/MSYS gnu make.

Cheers, Kuba