Dreaming of DawnIn addition to making php and lots of php extensions available for download, I'm also slowly working on getting some common open source libraries and tools (mainly ones used by/for php and php-gtk) compiling on windows. For some libraries this isn't a problem, for others it won't be so easy.
Today's project (which is finished) was libiconv. The library is already available from Edin's magic windows build pack and from Tor Lillqvist's gtk goodies site since it's part of the gtk dependency tree, even from the gtk and gnome ftp servers and the GnuWin32 project. See the problem though? (Besides the potential MSVC mixing with MinGW junk since only Edin's is compiled with MSVC) The version available is, quite frankly, OLD - the last release of libiconv is 1.11, the available version for windows is 1.9. Let's all just say "ewww" in unison (especially since the release date was 2004 for the 1.9 series and 2006 for 1.11, two years ??).
Bug fixes happen, even windows. Windows needs a little more up to date builds. So I put together three MSVC projects (one for each version, hurray) that are now available from http://perisama.net/downloads because most windows developers are scared to death of makefiles and configuration of any kind. I'm hoping to slowly fill up the "developer" section with more recent builds for all the commonly used open source items. Now becuase everything and it's brother depends on libiconv I can't really do a lot of replacing right away... not until libintl (and other gettext goodies) and libxml2 and...lots of other stuff is built.
Little side note on perisama doling out libs - there will always be the problem of the non-open source stuff, and the open source stuff that has "official" builds. But progress is always a good thing.
gaetano giunta
This is a really great great thing!
The only problem I see with building updated versions of the "very common" unix libs and making them available on perisama is the "officialness" of the release and possible conflicts/dll hell.
I have started yesterday my first php windows build - following your excellent guide for vc%2B%2B20055 express - and I had to spend a little too much time just to figure out version differences between zip.zip from edin's site and win32build from php.net. And that was after reading the extremely detailed tutorial.
I also had a local copy of flex and bison as part of unxutils (which in itself is a great thing) but kinda weird: the sf.net zip package dates from 1/3/07 but the files have been built on 14/4/03) but picking the correct one was less of a problem since it's just tooling) ie. not part of the compiled-in libs.
LibIconv and ssl are in fact distributed with a lot of apps (even commercial ones). Playing around with paths and testing new software I always fear to end up using an incompatible one (especially vis-a-vis the vc6-built vs. vc8-built problem).
You mentioned Tor's version, gnuwin32 and edin's one. Now we will have four (if the single libs do not start appearing on apachelounge that is...). And for some of those downloads it's hard to understand what version you are getting and what are the implied dependencies...
2007-06-27 5:19 am