> "Suhaib Siddiqi" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> >1) LessTif precompiled binaries are not available for
> >MSVC, therefore you cannot use Microsoft Visual C/C++, unless you
> >2) Use GNU GCC under Cygwin developemnt tool chain. It does
> >3) Use Exceed XDK, which comes with X11R6.3 and MOTIF 2.0
>
> btw., did someone try to build on Bell Labs' U/WIN already?
Yes, a long time ago, at the request of Nilendu Pal of Wipro.
Here are my comments, based upon my knowledge of X and UNIX emulation of
Windows, like U/WIn and Cygwin, plus experience with both products.
1) U/WIN lacks GNU tools support therefore I consider it to a very user
unfriendly and pain in the neck kind of tool.
To most of the Linux code to U/WIN, you may end up spending several hours
fideling with configure scripts.
2) You U/WIN messed up twice my NT permissions. I sent the bugs
to Nilendu Pal and David Korn. David answer was, it must be windows
messing up Windows permissions, because he never had this problems...
not a porofessional answer. I hate those kind of answers, "It works OK
on my system, so you there is no problem with my software."
3) One of Wipro customer reported to Nilendu Pal, that his MOTIF
applications were crashing with access_violations and dlls intialization
error
message. Nilendu of Wipro requested if I could help his customer
out. I knew the cause of problem before hand. The X11R6.4 in U/WIN is
lousey. David Korn compiled libXmu and libXt as DLLs. Windows
cannnot handle those libs as DLLs. Here is the reson of why you should
not compile libXmu and libXt as DLLs...
3.12
Will there be Xaw.DLL, Xt.DLL and Xmu.DLL?
No. GCC is free software, and most stuff written for it is also freely
available.
Recompile if you want.However, keep the following in mind:
"One of the biggest issues with X on Win32 is the moronic DLL format.
Specifically -
it is not possible to export data from a Win32 DLL in a form that can be
used to
statically initialize another global variable. Data access from a DLL
requires at least one pointer
indirection, and hence executable code. This is why X11R6 doesn't have DLLs
for Xt/Xmu/Xaw
(and Motif) on Win32", quoted from XFree86-developers Mailing List - David
E. Wexelblat (
[EMAIL PROTECTED]) Wed, 25 Mar 1998 10:08:27 -0500.
Read http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/xfree/faq.html (a project I
spearhead) to
learn more about ins and outs of X/MOTIf on WIndows.
.......So I wrote to Nilendu Pal of Wipro that they should recompile
their X11R6.4 for U/WIN and build libXmu and libXt as static libraries
not as DLLs. Nilendu Pal forwarded my suggestion to David Korn. Mr. Korn
wrote back that, it is not true. He spent a lot of time getting Xmu and Xt
as DLLs
compiled. I sent him the above para from my FAQ. He responded back
"Well, but not exactly true." because xterm does work. I think
it was a very unprofessional response from a well known developer.
One thing works does not mean, it is going to work with everything and
under every piece of the code in the universe.
Wipro customer got hold of X11R6.4 source code, and ignored
David's comments and refusal to accept that it was a BAD idea to compile
Xmu and Xt as DLLs on Windows, unless he wrote a custom DLL which would
provide missing functionalities and Xt and XMu DLLs would call this DLLs
first instead of calling Windows C runtime DLLs .. Hummingbird folks did.
So he recompiled his X11R6.4 for U/WIN, with Xt and Xmu as static libraries
and his applications started behaving.
My conclusion, a product cannot succedd in the market if its
main devlopers have close minded attitude. This is very true
U/Win. One of the success of Cygwin, beside having full GNU support,
is community effort to make it a powerful development tools.
Regards
Suhaib
> I recently tried to build lesstif on UWIN2.1 on a win98 machine
> and the configure failed when it tried to execute libtool (don't
> remember the actual error message though).
> UWIN comes with X11R6.4 (except server, I used XWin32) and extends
> Windows with Unix functionality (it also comes with an almost complete
> userland, include files etc.).
> I have used the egcs compiler ported to UWIN although it is generally
> recommended to use an installed VC++ as cc (which I do not have).
> I would also think that it may be more promising to build on NT, since
> on '98 U/WIN only runs in some kind of "degraded mode".
>
> Maybe if I find some time, I'll see if I can get it compiled somehow,
> it certainly would be nice.
>
> mkb
>
> [the UWIN website is at http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/]
