Hi List!
While currently working on the "Ethereal Developer Guide", some points
come to my mind, which might simplify the win32 environment setup a lot.
First, we currently have a very "interesting" toolchain:
-MSVC V6: C compiler and nmake
-cygwin: bash, (sed, wget, flex, bison, perl)
or
-win32 native perl from perl.com
-win32 native python from python.org
-...
and of course:
-sources from SVN
-Automated library download
Why don't we use python and other packages from cygwin as default? I'm
using this for quite a while without problems.
As a result of the current process (we don't require win32 developers to
have sed, flex and such tools available),
we have different files in the released and trunk sources, which is
confusing and hard to explain.
Currently you have to explain that some files (the intermediate source
files) can only be build with unix tools and are included in the
releases, but not in the latest sources, and ...
THAT IS A DIRTY HACK IMHO!!!
As the cygwin packages are easy to install and have every tool we need
to build everything we want, it would be my favourite way to require
win32 people to install all required tools from it.
What I have in mind, as the *recommended* (default) way to build Ethereal:
-MSVC V6
-several packages from cygwin (with requiring ALL tools incl. the ones
to build the intermediate files)
and of course:
-sources from SVN
-Automated library download
This will:
a) make it much easier to explain what you will need and how to install
b) won't make it necessary to have different files in the release and
developer source "packages"
It's all about the default way to give an easy way to a novice user,
without making it more complicated to the advanced users.
I don't want to force anyone to install cygwin. If anyone wants to use
the native python or such, it's still possible to finetune the
config.nmake to suit your personal needs (I don't want to remove that way)
Regards, ULFL