Experimental UNICODE-only MinGW Build

[João Garcia]

Hi Mohan,

Thank you! Nice work. This can be useful for many people already, and it 
is a step forward.

Could you post the relevant code (using the mailing list or on your web 
site)? Thank you. :-)
(just natFileWin32.java and natFileDescriptorWin32.java and eventual 
helper functions/classes).
I do not know if the experimental gcj bundle includes those sources, but 
if you would post the relevant sources we (or at least i...) wouldn't 
have to pull the bundle to evaluate it...

>At present, this will produce executables for WinNT / Win2K / WinXP
>only. I'm going to look into integrating this with UNICOWS for
>Win9X platforms:
>
>http://libunicows.sourceforge.net
>
>  
>
But AFAIK this is only the static link portion for the dll (and it is 
not small). Am i right?
You still have to have the MS dll for this to work on Win9X.
And you cannot allow re-distribution of the DLL and can only distribute 
it bundled with your code that should be exclusively for Windows platform...
In other words: MS forces you to limit your own distribution license and 
bundled code (see Open Office project for details)...
And it is not easy to set a link for the UNICOWS distribution in the MS 
web site (it changes all the time)...

Besides that, you do not need the major part of the UNICOWS bundle just 
to make character conversions. It would be better to make our own 
"mini-unicows" for this purpose, based on 
WideCharToMultiByte()/MultiByteToWideChar() and A-function calls!
Anyway... this would make things for Win32 to far apart from POSIX in 
the IO library... I would not recommend this way at all...
But you could do this just for sport! :-)

>I did this in the spirit of curious experimentation only; it should not
>be construed as any official stance or direction.
>
>  
>
It would be nice... :-)

João