coapp-developers team mailing list archive

[Olaf van der Spek <olafvdspek@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 3:20 AM, Trent Nelson <trent@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> >> What kind of build options are we talking about?
>> >> For some projects this might be a problem, but I think there are
>> >> enough projects for which this will not be a problem.
>> >
>> > Optimization flags, availability of .pdb debugging symbols (e.g.
>> > equivalent of foo-debug linux/bsd distro package variants), etc.
>>
>> I'm not sure I understand the problem.
>> Different projects might use different optimizations, so what?
>
> Bill definitely has a valid point.  You'd be surprised at what kind of crazy builds you can end up with for some open source projects when you attempt to build them on Windows with their out-of-the-box settings (assuming their release even compiles on Windows; OpenSSL has the odd release every now and then that just flat out doesn't compile out-of-the-box on Windows).

Bill?

> I remember how much trouble I had trying to get the out-of-the-box Windows builds of BerkeleyDB and TclTk to work with Python.  BerkeleyDB was using the most esoteric compiler and linker flags that I've ever come across, and the resulting binary, especially in 64-bit builds, just flat out wasn't suitable for linking against.  I mean, it would link, 'cause the API was compatible at the source level, but you'd get the strangest crashes as soon as you attempted to call anything in that library.  TclTk wasn't much better -- and SQLite was problematic too, now that I think of it.

What is the reason for those weird flags?
-- 
Olaf