Re: Meson far from ready on Windows

On Tue, 25 Jun 2024 at 11:41, Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 2024-06-21 12:20:49 +0100, Dave Page wrote:
> > > I'm confused - the old build system wasn't flexible around this stuff
> *at
> > > all*. Everyone had to patch it to get dependencies to work, unless you
> > > chose
> > > exactly the right source to download from - which was often not
> documented
> > > or
> > > outdated.
> > >
> >
> > As I noted above - as the "owner" of the official packages, I never did
> > despite using a variety of upstream sources.
>
> For reference, with 16 and src/tools/msvc:
> - upstream zstd build doesn't work, wrong filename (libzstd.dll.a instead
> of libzstd.lib)
> - upstream lz4 build doesn't work, wrong filename (liblz4.dll.a instead of
> liblz4.lib)
> - openssl, from https://slproweb.com/products/Win32OpenSSL.htm , as our
> docs suggest: doesn't work, wrong filenames (openssl.lib instead of
> lib*64.lib, works if you delete lib/VC/sslcrypto64MD.lib)
> - iconv/intl: mismatching library names (lib*.dll.a lib*.lib)
>
> - zlib at least at least from some of the sources (it's hard to tell,
> because
> everything available is so outdated), wrong filenames
>

https://github.com/dpage/winpgbuild proves that the hacks above are not
required *if* you build the dependencies in the recommended way for use
with MSVC++ (where documented), otherwise just native Windows.

If you, for example, build a dependency using Mingw/Msys, then you may get
different filenames than if you build the same thing using its VC++
solution or makefile. That's where most, if not all, of these issues come
from.

It's probably worth noting that "back in the day" when most of this stuff
was built, there was no UCRT32 compiler option, and it really was a
potential problem to mix VC++ and Mingw compiled binaries so there was a
heavy focus on making sure everything was designed around the MSVC++ builds
wherever they existed.

--
Dave Page
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