[mercury-users] 0.7.3 on NT

[Fergus Henderson]

On 07-Oct-1998, Don Syme <dsyme at microsoft.com> wrote:
> 
> I'm having a hard time getting Mercury to compile under Windows NT.  
> Has anyone got a binary release of 0.7.3?

Depending on the nature of the problems, even a binary release may not
help.  Which version of gnu-win32 are you using?  Mercury version 0.7.3
will not work with gnu-win32 version b19, for a couple of reasons: 

	(a) gnu-win32 b19 included a new version of GNU binutils, I think,
	    which included some changes that broke the conservative garbage
	    collector that we use

	(b) the version of gcc in b19 is buggy (it generates incorrect code)

So, you can either use gnu-win32 b18, or you can get the latest
release-of-the-day release of Mercury (you need one dated Oct 5 or
later!) from <ftp://turiel.cs.mu.oz.au/pub/mercury/beta-releases>, and
use egcs instead of the gcc which comes with b19 (see below for URL).

If that description of the problems with gnu-win32 b19
doesn't explain your problem, then you could of course try
mailing a detailed description of the problem to
<mercury-bugs at cs.mu.oz.au>.

I've appended an extract from the README.MS-Windows file in
our latest release-of-the-day distribution.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3        |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.

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The version of gcc that comes with gnu-win32 version b19 (and b19.1),
called `gcc 2.7-b19', has a bug which causes it to generate incorrect
code when compiling Mercury.  So if you want to use gnu-win32 version b19,
then you need to also install a version of gcc that has this bug fixed,
such as egcs version 1.0.2 or later.  Note that Mercury has not yet
been tested properly with b19, so currently we recommend using b18.

You can download gnu-win32 from <ftp://ftp.cygnus.com/pub/gnu-win32>.
You can download a binary distribution of egcs 1.0.2 for gnu-win32
from <http://www.xraylith.wisc.edu/~khan/software/gnu-win32/>
or <ftp://ftp.xraylith.wisc.edu/pub/khan/gnu-win32/cygwin32/releases/>.

Once you have installed gnu-win32 and (for b19) egcs, check that
`bash' and `gcc' work.   Make sure that `gcc --version' does not
report `2.7-b19'.

For more information on gnu-win32, see <ftp://ftp.cygnus.com/pub/gnu-win32>
or <http://www.cygnus.com/misc/gnu-win32/>.

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