[Openmcl-devel] CCL on Windows

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 1:12 PM, Ron Garret <ron at flownet.com> wrote:
> I'm trying to help someone with a CCL project that they have to deliver on Windows, so I held my nose, fired up Parallels, and downloaded ccl-1.8-windowsx86.zip.  I fired it up, it briefly flashed a window on the screen which promptly vanished without a trace.
>
> Ah, I said to myself, now I remember why I don't use Windows.
>
> But I really would like to be able to help people who want to run CCL on Windows, so I'm kind of morbidly curious about how one goes about debugging problems like this.  When it comes to Windows, I am completely at sea.  I have never done any Windows development.  I have never used Windows for more than an hour or so at a time (which is about all I can take).  I'm at a conceptual loss, a complete and utter newbie.  How do you even get started when you don't have a shell?  That is not a rhetorical question by the way.  How do I run SVN?  How do I figure out what version of Windows I'm running?  How can I tell if I'm running 32 or 64 bit?  I know it's some ancient version of XP running under Parallels.  Is CCL even expected to work?

I don't often develop on Windows, but when I do (like for OpenAxiom
based on CCL, http://www.open-axiom.org/), I use mingw-w64

    http://mingw-w64.sourceforge.net/

Here are the tools I use:
   -- msys for mingw-w64, conveniently packaged
         http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/mingw-w64/wiki/MSYS

  -- mingw-w64 developments tools (+GCC)
        http://tdm-gcc.tdragon.net/

  -- SVN (TortoiseSVN comes with command-line binaries to execute)
       http://tortoisesvn.net/

  -- XEmacs

I've repeated used CCL with those tools on Windows 7 box (Windows XP box)
to build OpenAxiom.  It is what I am planning to do for the next release.

-- Gaby