[Xapian-discuss] Building Xapian on windows

[Olly Betts]

On Sat, Jan 03, 2015 at 05:55:25PM +0530, Abhishek Singh Kushwah wrote:
> Most probably Xapian is used with CYGWIN in Windows and Windows Specific
> Code in Xapian is based on CYGWIN,

Just to be clear, Xapian supports building on Windows both with and
without Cygwin.

But as James notes, the "MSVC makefiles" haven't been actively
maintained for some time, and don't work for building current trunk.

What would be ideal would be to sort out allowing building using MSVC
with the standard build system - this shouldn't be hard to do, but needs
someone actually developing on Windows to work on it.  It would require
having the MSYS tools installed, but that's not a difficult requirement
given our target audience is developers.  If that's really felt to be
too hard, we can package up a build into an installer.

This would be a much more maintainable solution that trying to have two
parallel build systems - the nmake one will inevitably be a second-class
citizen as most developers can't test it even if they wanted too, and
most quite reasonably won't want to as nmake is a very strange make
implementation.

Cheers,
    Olly