Subject: Resource compiler problems (was RE: Why is cygwin.dll?)
From: [email-masked] (Colin Peters)

19 Jan 1997 22:33:06 -0800
Approved: [email-masked]
Distribution: cygnus
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Original-To: "'jl Hamel'" <[email-masked]>
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jl Hamel[SMTP:[email-masked]] wrote:
>I have tried minwin32 on the examples from the "Windows 95 Win 32 Programming
>API Bible" (RIchard Simon). The compilation of c programs succeeds but
>I have troubles with the resource files ; the resource compiler rcl does
>not understand anything to the resources files of the Bible... (It compiles
>successfully the example which comes with the rcl distribution).
>Does anybody knows a version of rcl able to compile all Windows resource files ?
>This is very important because almost all Windows applications need resource
>files.

It's not my fault, honest! :-)

Seriously though, rcl seems to have, in general, a lot of trouble with the 
resource files from books like that, or automatically produced by (for example)
the Borland Resource Workshop. The Borland (and MS as well I suspect) resource
editor programs produce resource files which use slightly different syntax from
the 'specification'. To summarize Gunther Ebert (rcl's author) "I followed the
spec, and there are too many little variations to sensibly take into account."

You can believe him or not as you like (I believe him), but it does seem
that he hasn't placed a high priority on dealing with issues like {} versus
BEGIN END and such (which is as it should be considering the other improvements
and bug fixes he's working on).

You might want to consider the resource compiler and resource editor
combination mentioned on the mailing list by Jacob Navia
([email-masked]). He wrote them himself for his compiler suite lcc.
He says the binaries will be available for free and he will charge for
source code. In my experience this guy knows what he's doing (and writes
a hell of a lot of code), so these programs might work better than rcl.
Unfortunately I'm not aware of a distribution site for this package yet.

There's also a resource compiler included with the rsxntdj package (see
http://www.fu.is.saga-u.ac.jp/~colin/mingw32-download.html or download
rsxntdj1.zip from the gnu/djgpp/v2tk directory of your local simtelnet
mirror). I'm not sure whether that resource compiler is better or
worse than rcl.

The other solution is to "fix" the resource files from the book so that
they don't use stuff rcl doesn't understand. Unfortunately I don't know
exactly what rcl does and does not understand, so this could be a fairly
frustrating experience.

To be fair however, I must point out that if you are trying to make your
own Win32 program instead of compile an example from a book it is possible
to use rcl and resource files based on the example included with rcl to
do it with only a little pain. And most of that pain comes from not having
a resource editor (again Jacob Navia's work may be a solution).

Anyway, good luck.

Colin.

-- Colin Peters - [email-masked]
-- Saga University Dept. of Information Science
-- Fundamentals of Information Science
-- http://www.fu.is.saga-u.ac.jp/~colin/home.html

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