[m-rev.] for review: mercury.bat

[Fergus Henderson]

On 19-Apr-2001, Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> Recently there has been some discussion about getting Mercury to work on
> Windows without Cygwin.  The change enclosed below is not a complete solution.
> But I'd appreciate comments about
> - whether this is a worthwhile goal
> - whether this approach is a reasonable approach to achieve that goal
> - whether I should commit this part now,
>   or whether we should wait until there is a solution
>   to problem (1) [see below] before committing this
> 
> The main drawback, I think, is that solving (1) is likely to require
> a fairly substantial amount of code duplication: scripts/ml is 1400
> lines of Bourne shell script.
> 
> ----------
> 
> Estimated hours taken: 4
> Branches: main
> 
> A small start towards getting the Mercury compiler to run on Mingw,
> without Cygwin: add a `mercury.bat' batch file for invoking the Mercury
> compiler.
> 
> Note that currently Cygwin is still required:
> 	(1) For `c2init' and `ml'.
> 	(2) For `mmake'.
> 	(3) For installation (`configure' and `make install').
> 
> There are work-arounds for some but not all of these:
> 	(1) XXX Currently there's no work-around for `c2init' and `ml'
> 	(2) `mmake' is not strictly necessary; you can always invoke the
> 	    necessary commands by hand.  This is of course tedious and
> 	    error-prone, so we might eventually include more of mmake's
> 	    functionality into the Mercury compiler itself.
> 	(3) This would be easy enough to avoid; if we're willing to hard-code
> 	    the installation path, we could easily package up the installation
> 	    in a WinZip file or something similar.

Tyson pointed out that `c2init' and `ml' are not needed for the .NET
back-end, and expressed interest in creating a binary distribution for
.NET that doesn't need Cygwin.  So I plan to go ahead and commit this one.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
                                    |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
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