[redland-dev] Redland Windows binaries - maintainer wanted

[John Barstow]

On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 7:02 AM, Dave Beckett <dave at dajobe.org> wrote:
>
>
> So can I try again to ask for somebody to actively maintain these?
>

I'm currently in the process of getting my WIndows VM set up to
attempt to build these. Since there's at least one other person doing
the same (hi Joe!) I thought I'd do a brain dump of the issues I
recall from my initial porting a couple of years ago.

The main stumbling block (aside from figuring out the correct includes
and #ifdefs to actually build, which is semi-trivial) was the fact
that the language bindings, libraries, and third-party libraries all
need to be linked against the same Windows runtime (WIndows provides
several) or you have major issues (usually around
allocation/deallocation of memory IIRC)

My recollections can of course be cross-checked against the solution
files I generated. From memory, the path to victory was as follows:

1) Grab the latest Python for Windows. Look at the runtime they link against.
2) Build the libraries and their dependencies using the same runtime.
   - I seem to recall statically linking most the third-party
dependencies, like PCRE, to avoid DLL hell.
   - Most of the database backends were probably compiled as dynamic,
late binding DLLs.
3) Iterate until successful compilation and passing of the test suites.
4) Build the language bindings against the same runtime. Run the
language binding test suites.
5) Package and release.

I did some blog posts at the time which *might* have discussed some
porting issues; I'll see about republishing them on my current blog (I
surrendered the original domain quite some time ago). And of course my
old posts to this list may make useful reading.