Compiling Guile under Win32

["Richard Y. Kim" <ryk at coho dot net>]

>>>>> "RS" == Rafael R Sevilla <dido@pacific.net.ph> writes:

    RS> I have to ask something...  Is it a trivial thing to
    RS> build Guile under Win32 using the GNU/Win32
    RS> development tools?  I'm just asking because I'm
    RS> thinking of using Guile in a cross-platform project
    RS> under both Linux and Windoze, but don't have
    RS> GNU/Win32 tools yet.  If it's a complicated thing to
    RS> do, then I'll just stick with libscheme and compile
    RS> it under VC++ (a poor path, but a necessary one
    RS> given time and network bandwidth limits).  Thanks a
    RS> lot in advance.

The following was posted to comp.lang.scheme a few days ago.

I've been using guile 1.3.4 under Win98/NT for a few weeks.
Using cygwin 1.0 <http://sourceware.cygnus.com/cygwin/>,
the normal compilation process, i.e.,

	tar zxf guile-1.3.4.tar.gz
	cd guild-1.3.4
	./configure
	make
	make install

worked fine except for two problems:

First, the file guile-1.3.4/ice-9/and-let*.scm could not be
created, because '*' seems to be an illegal character for
file names in Windows environment.

Second, cygwin dll does not seem to provide fchown C
library function. So I simply defined it with empty body.
Of course, this means that the scheme function scm_chown
will not do the right thing.  scm_chown was the only function
where fchwon was called in guile-1.3.4/libguile/filesys.c.

With the two hacks, I've been using guile for a few weeks.
I have no idea what else may be broken under win32
environment, but I was more concerned with having guile
available.  So far, I have not noticed any problems.