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Charles-Warren Wardlaw <kattford@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> ... and now the Watcom port compiles in 3.9.32 with no help. =)
>
> Actually, I've run across one problem: the fixwat batch file must be
> missing something because, asmdefs.inc thinks I'm compiling for djgpp,
> and is looking for asmdef.inc in obj/djgpp for some reason.
What version of djgpp do you have? I'm pretty sure this is a bug in the
specs file for one of the more recent djgpp releases (not sure which one,
though, or whether it is fixed yet).
During dependency generation, the makefile uses gcc to scan which headers
get included (because Watcom has no option for doing that), but obviously
needs to trick Allegro into using Watcom rather than djgpp headers, so it
uses a bunch of switches like "-UDJGPP -U__unix__ -D__WATCOMC__" to make
the environment look like it is really Watcom. Unfortunately in one
version of the djgpp specs, though, the DJGPP macro was set up in some
weird way that prevented it from being removed with -UDJGPP, so it
ignored that command option. That is certainly a compiler bug and I think
has probably already been fixed, but in any case there is an easy
workaround: I'll put the check for DJGPP after the checks for other
compilers, so anything that defines both will use the non-DJGPP header in
preference (alconfig.h already does that, but asmdefs.inc checked them in
a different order).
> I have a ... question of ethics for the conductors: do you think
> Powersoft would mind us "sharing" copies of the Watcom compiler?
I think it would be a bad idea: my copy of 10.6 is already of dubious
legality (it sort of fell off the back of a lorry :-) but even if they
aren't developing it any more, it's still illegal to distribute copies
(stay tuned on that, though: this isn't official yet, but a little birdie
tells me there might be some more news on the subject sometime soon).
I'm not so sure that distributing copies would help anything, though.
Lack of support for a platform isn't so much due to not having the
software, and not having time/interest to work on it. I do test most
changes with Watcom 10.6, but only very superficially, since I have no
interest in that compiler myself. Really solid support can only come if
someone who actually uses the platform starts fixing everything that they
can find wrong with it, and obviously anyone who's going to do that will
already have the software in question. As things get ported to an ever
wider range of compilers and platforms, I think it's actually very
important to find ways of making this work without any single person
needing access to all of them (eg. my recent changes to make zipup.sh
create dependency information even for compilers that aren't accessible
to it). Any system that requires one maintainer to test on many compilers
will scale very badly as the platform list increases...
> Has a watcom/win32 port been discussed? I was just wondering -- I
> personally do my windows development using Builder -- but Watcom may be
> another one of those compilers capable of building its own native dll...
Strictly speaking anything that can create a DLL could create Allegro as
a DLL: it's just a question of how much work is involved in making it do
that, and it is usually much less work just to get it linking with the
MSVC DLL. But certainly such a port would be possible, and I'd be
delighted to see it if any Windows/Watcom people want to work on such a
thing...
--
Shawn Hargreaves - shawn@xxxxxxxxxx - http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/
"A binary is barely software: it's more like hardware on a floppy disk."