On Wednesday 25 February 2009 16:08:49 rparussel [..] ... wrote:
> A colleague of mine, Mark Gillespie, has made some good progress getting
> simple Orocos tasks to build and run under MinGW.
>
> I believe he's applied a couple of patches to a mainstream version of
> Orocos to get as far as he has.
>
> We were wondering how you are planning to support this win32 capability in
> the future. Will you be integrating this win32 patch into a future
> mainstream relase. If you were planning to do this when do you think that
> this would happen?

Concerning ports, I'm quite open to bringing them in early, even if not all
functionality works yet. It helps testing & bug reporting and it doesn't hurt
existing users. I'm tracking the win32 patches locally as well.

The two main issues with this port is that it changes the type system (adds
dependency on C++ type_id), and for testing on native Windows the boost tests
are needed. I only want one unit test framework and I'm very in favour of
boost, but if anyone could defend/compare cppunit vs boost, it could help
making my descision easier...

These aren't show stoppers, but they need to go in before the Windows port
can. 1.10.0 looks like an acceptable target for now.

>
> Ultimately, we would need to use Orocos in a Visual Studio environment. Do
> you know whether anyone else is porting an up to date version of Orocos to
> Visual Studio and whether that port might one day make its way into a
> mainstream version of Orocos?

I have no objections, but I won't be the primary tester of this code. If
someone wants to crown him/herself as the '(un)official' win32/VisualStudio
maintainer (which also means he sorts out problems reported by users), I'll
follow up and merge in his patches.

Peter