[Xapian-discuss] Re: Problem with bindings and MinGW

[franz.g at tin.it]

Hi Olly,

> You need fork, socketpair, gethostbyname and gethostbyaddr
> for the remote backend.  And if any of these are missing,
> configure will disable the remote backend automatically.

you are right: AFAIK MinGW neither supports fork() nor is intended to...
Cygwin is more an emulation layer, thus many more system calls or posix/unix
functions are supported. But for what I could see, the Xapian library *correctly*
disables network backend support on Win32/MinGW (btw, I'm using MinGW version
3.1.0, but I also upgraded gcc to 3.4.2). In fact ld reports that Xapian::Remote::open
cannot be resolved when linking the high-level language bindings against
libxapian*.a.

The only problem with the bindings is that they are built with SWIG, and
I really do not know it... otherwise I'd be glad to try to contribute a
patch that directly affects the interface files, in order to always disable
remote backend support on native MinGW. However I'll try to do my best to
sort it out ;-) (don't expect much: I've been avoiding C/C++ for years and
years when I switched to Python).

There are some other problems, however, with the xapian-bindings configure
script and generated makefiles, at least for Python: in fact, it assumes
that Python is installed "the UNIX way", that is it assumes that libraries
are in $PYTHON_PREFIX/lib/python2.3 and so on. That is why I actually submitted
a "setup.py" file for Python, which "incidentally" allows building on all
Python supported platforms. However I realize that this is not the Xapian
distribution style, that tries to possibly build bindings for all available
languages at once. I think that it's not going to be a picnic to allow to
build everything (with the said limitations) natively on Win32 with MinGW.

Thank you again for replying,

F.


>>@
Risposte/Replies :
Francesco Garosi
  Office: <f.garosi at usl7.toscana.it> (++39/0577/586937)
  Home: <franz.g at infinito.it> (++39/0577/47806)