On 13/03/2016 07:27, Matt Johnson wrote:

With the recent contributions to tzcode, I understand that building under MinGW should now be possible. However, I've gone through all the docs I could find on various ways to set up an environment for this, and despite my best efforts and several hours of frustration, I could not get a successful build.

It would be greatly appreciated if someone could either respond with a quick "how to", or post a blog or something explaining the minimal setup needed to make this work. Which distribution do I download (MinGW, MinGW-w64), what environment do I need (cygwin, msys, bare windows), what minimal toolchain or cygwin packages, or msys packages, etc do I need? Do I need "Win-builds" (win-build.org)?

I can tell you what I used to build it. I used the MSYS2 system as a base, as it seems to be in a better state of health than the older MSYS and MSYSGIT systems. I'd never heard of "Win-builds" before you mentioned it. There is another competing system called TDM-GCC that I haven't used, personally, but uses the same gcc executable to build both 32-bit and 64-bit programs. The package manager for MSYS2 includes a couple of toolchains from the MinGW-w64 project - one for i686, and one for x86_64. (I assume nobody cares about supporting i386, i486, and i586 any longer!). Each of those toolchains includes a Windows shortcut to run bash in a terminal with slightly different PATH settings as compared to the standard MSYS2 environment. MSYS2 can be installed from <http://msys2.github.io/>. There are versions for 32-bit and 64-bit systems. Once installed, the pacman command can be used to install additional packages, such as "git", "man", "make", "mingw-w64-i686-toolchain", and "mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain". Some of those are "virtual" packages that just pull in a load of other packages via dependencies. When the toolchains have been installed, then as well as the existing "MSYS2 Shell" shortcut in the start menu, there should be additional shortcuts "MinGW-w64 Win32 Shell" (for compiling native 32-bit stuff) and "MinGW-w64 Win64 Shell" (for compiling native 64-bit stuff). I use the following command to compile tz under one of those MinGW-w64 environments: make CFLAGS="-DHAVE_SYS_WAIT_H=0 -DHAVE_DIRECT_H=1 -DHAVE_SYMLINK=0 -DHAVE_LINK=0 -DHAVE_DECL_ASCTIME_R=0 -DHAVE_LOCALTIME_R=0 -DHAVE_DOS_FILE_NAMES" In addition to setting CFLAGS on the make command line, you might want to set TZDIR to the place where the zoneinfo files will be read from by the zdump executable. Using backslashes in the TZDIR pathname can be tricky due to the use of backslash as an escape character. It's easier to stick with forward slashes, since the Windows API allows forward slash as a directory separator. One thing I had a problem with was setting DESTDIR to an absolute path (or not setting it at all) during "make install", which caused zic to fail to create a directory. I fixed that by adding "-DHAVE_DOS_FILE_NAMES" to CFLAGS above.

Also, is compiling under Visual Studio possible?

Probably -- with a bit of hacking to the source code, especially to use its non-standard, 64-bit integer type names and corresponding printf/scanf format specifiers.

At the end of the day, I want a zic.exe that I can run against a specific set of tzdata source files, and a zdump.exe I can run on the binary output of zic. I'd like to be able to run both on Windows without having to have anything special on the machine at runtime.

-- -=( Ian Abbott @ MEV Ltd. E-mail: <abbotti@mev.co.uk> )=- -=( Web: http://www.mev.co.uk/ )=-