[redland] experimenting with win32 build of redland via cygwin

[Dan Brickley]

On Fri, 24 May 2002, Dave Beckett wrote:

> >>>Dan Brickley said:
> >
> > Apologies if this has all been done before. Google search and skimming
> > http://groups.yahoo.com/group/redland/ suggests not, although I did
> > find an #ifndef WIN32 in one of the src files...
>
> That's from the WIN32 build of raptor that is used in a couple of
> products and some other places.

aha

> > Anyway, with some minor fiddling (commenting out refs to 'errno') both
> > Redland and Raptor build (from CVS) under Cygwin[1] on my Windows2000
> > laptop.
>
> Nice; it is a pretty general library using standard C libraries and
> little more.

OK. Should be able to ifdef around this minor hiccup?

> > I grabbed the .exe for the rdfdump command line utility and bundled it up
> > with the two .dlls it seems to need, see http://tux.w3.org/~danbri/redland/rdf2nt.tar.gz
>
> rdfdump is the raptor tool.

Yeah, was the only useful utility I could find.

When I rebuilt today with autogen.sh, the redland build found the raptor
code. I don't think that happened before. So win32 redland passes 13/13
tests :)

Hmm, where did that Cygwin / making DLLs URL go that I found? Wrapping
Redland up as a VB-scriptable .dll would be a nice public service.

Wonder if there are any volunteers? Could be basis for a student project
maybe?

> The example4 redland program is a pretty-much standalone RDF redland
> program that I've been meaning to make more prominent if I can think
> of a good name for it - rdfdb?  rdftool?

rdfdb's pretty much gone: it's the name of rdfdb. Avoiding generic names
is nice. I'm thinking I'll rename RubyRDF (actually in merger talks with
Libby re 'inkling' name :). How about redparse or redutil or redadmin?
redbox? redgreen? redface? rdfland?

Having some cross-toolkit common comandline conventions would be really
nifty btw. Not sure if we're at the stage where that makes sense.

>
> > -- if someone else with access to a windows box could check this works for
> > them, i'd be grateful.
> >
> > This all seems pretty smooth. I don't have any other C compilers
> > available in Win32 execept the cygwin stuff, but it seems just fine. And
> > all the GNU build tools seem to just work fine.
> >
> > I've no idea how one would go about bridging a cygwin-built redland with
> > traditional/mainstream windows stuff (VB, .NET, GUI stuff etc). Presumably
> > cygwin gcc can be convinced to generate DLLs that can be called from VB
> > etc? Dunno, not my area... :)
>
> I understand WIN32 dlls needs some extra support for declaring
> exported symbols, so I'm not confident it'll necessarily work.

The cygwin page was pretty useful. I can't find it now. It explained the
process as fiddly, but seemed straightfoward.

http://www.nanotech.wisc.edu/~khan/software/gnu-win32/dllhelpers.html
is similar. Searching for dll, cygwin, dllhelpers gets one close to the
needed info.

Dan