Re: WIN32 compilation, UML Sequence Diagrams and Inheritance arrows and the spirit of GNU software.

[Cyrille Chepelov <cyrille chepelov org>]

Le Mon, Aug 19, 2002, à 06:32:08AM -0700, James Michael DuPont a écrit:
> Dear All,
> 
> I have been very frustrated multiple times by the mess of the win32
> build environment, and I have to say that it is time to make some
> improvements here.

[snip]

I don't want to be pointing fingers, and I understand your frustration, but
until now, Hans Breuer is the only one doing compilations. He knows the GPL
chapter and verse, for all I know.  However, he might be in vacation (I
don't know for Germany for sure, but in France August is a very popular
month for vacations...).

All I know on Win32 is that mingw32 support is broken (if it ever worked),
and the right way to compile is to use MSVC++ 6.0 no more no less (Hans,
feel free to correct if I'm wrong).


> Hans web page says here [2]:
> >>I'm using MSVC 5.0 command line compiler as development
> environment. >>All the win32 make and other files should be
> available in gnome cvs. >>If not it would be a bug of mine. But
> be warned: Dia on win32 is not >>yet ready to be build by
> everyone.

I stand corrected. He uses MSVC 5.0. Load the dsw (project file) into MSVC
5.0, and try to compile. He mentioned several times he uses CVS versions of
gtk+, you'll have to ask him.
 
> Well if you distribute the executables, then it is your duty to make
> the stuff complete and up to date. You cannot just put that on to me to
> do.

GPL demands that the stuff is available, it does not mandate free (gratis)
technical support. I believe Hans retains no file, and CVS includes
everything which is needed to build on his platform, except for the
libraries which are available elsewhere. What is very possible
is that the Makefile.am files lack some directives to make sure these files
are included in the release tarballs as well. If that happened, this is a
bug caused by the fact that the Win32 platform doesn't use the Makefile.am
files which are used on real platforms to build the tarballs. Please point
out any errors so that we can fix them. 

Let me repeat: it is very possible that the tarballs are incomplete with
respect to compiling on win32. If that happened, it's a bug, not malice.
Please tell us what's missing so that we can fix it. In any case, CVS is the
right place to look for missing stuff.

In order to make sure you know we fulfill the paragraph 3.b. requirement of the 
GPL, let me reiterate to you an offer for FREE! access to 
http://cvs.gnome.org. In the event
that site shall be taken down, please download the snapshot tarballs at
http://www.crans.org/~chepelov/dia/snapshots, which contain everything
which is in the CVS tree (they are not built using the "make dist" method).
I can guarantee to you that either site will remain active till August 19th,
2005, or that I will provide a replacement site upon request shall the
previously mentioned sites be taken down.

Happy ?

	-- Cyrille (unhappy to be thrown mud at)

PS: one likely outcome of deliberately pissing off people like you just did 
is the removal of Win32 support, plain and simple.

PS2: an even better project would be to help out building the dependencies
and dia proper on the mingw32 platform. This would untie dia from MSVC,
which would be a Good Thing(tm)
--
Grumpf.