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Date: Sat, 25 May 2013 22:02:54 +0300
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT gnu DOT org>
Subject: Re: Adding 64-bit file support to DJGPP
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> Date: Sat, 25 May 2013 11:30:52 -0700 (PDT)
> From: rugxulo AT gmail DOT com
> 
> Hi,
> > Did you actually try that?  My experience in porting to MinGW is
> > exactly the opposite: DJGPP has a lot of Posix-like features that
> > MinGW sorely lacks.  So porting to MinGW using a DJGPP port as a
> > starting point will generally give you a broken port, and in many
> > cases will simply refuse to compile or link.
> 
> IIRC, MinGW isn't explicitly targeting POSIX, only "native" Windows,

That's true, but that doesn't help in porting.  MinGW is what it is
(and they do have a small number of Posix functionality added).  The
rest is up to the person who does the port.

> > Besides, starting with DJGPP will automatically lose the advanced
> > features you can have with Windows: networking, threads, parallel
> > processes, etc.
> 
> If you're targeting all of that anyways, you're not really targeting
> pure ISO C, are you?

No non-trivial C program uses only ISO C.

> Almost better to "just use Java" (or Modula-3).

If the package is written in C, this again doesn't help.

> > DJ's suggestion to use MinGW is still valid, of course (although
> > MinGW still doesn't support generation of 64-bit executables; you
> > need to go to semi-official MinGW64 snapshots).  But please don't
> > underestimate the efforts required for porting a non-trivial
> > package to MinGW. Heck, even running a configure script is a
> > challenge, and requires an installation of yet another environment
> > (MSYS).
> 
> Blame those who refuse to code anything outside of POSIX.

I want to have a ported package, not to assign blame.

> Obviously AutoTools was never expected to work on systems without a
> native POSIX shell. It might be (barely) wrong to say outside
> developers don't care about Windows, but clearly it's not first
> priority target.

MSYS works very well, once you get it set up, and figure out how to
run it without MinGW getting in the way.