[Imapfilter-devel] Patch to build imapfilter on Windows

[Lefteris Chatzibarbas]

On Wed, Feb 06, 2002 at 03:33:32PM -0500, Danilo Almeida wrote:
> I think it is better to try to keep support for multiple platforms in
> the main distribution as long as it does not have a significant
> negative impact in the main development.
> 
> Maintaining separate ports also generally takes more overhead work on
> the part of the port maintainer.  It can also result in more forking,
> which just makes life more complicated for end users.  It is very
> useful to just be able to tell users to get Foo version X instead of
> get Joe's BazOS port of Foo version X (assuming that Joe managed to
> update his version X-1 port to version X).
> 
> If you look at things like Emacs, OpenSSL, and others, the trend is to
> include a wide range of platform support (including Windows support)
> into the mainline.  However, to be able to do that, you do have to
> have enough of a developer base actively working on the set of
> supported platforms.  If there is not enough interest in a particular
> platform (i.e., no developers wanting to maintain it), the support for
> that platform can always be dropped.

To clarify my position a bit...

The primary objective of imapfilter is to build and run under BSD and Linux.
Support for other UNIX/UNIX-like (Hurd, Solaris, Irix, Cygwin, etc.)
platforms will be added into the main distribution, because at most cases
the changes that will need to be made will be insignificant.  But for
platforms, such as in our case win32, where a lot of compatibility
code needs to added, I think it is best to have the port separate from the
main distribution.  I mean, it seems to be a little odd to burden the main
distribution (which size is 25k) with 60k more code, just for it, to build
under a specific platform.

Anyway, something else that came to my mind is how portable will imapfilter
be when for example Kerberos is added.  AFAIK, OpenSSL builds under win32
and with the addition of a regex, getopt and strsep implementation you
can have the full functionality of imapfilter.  Is it possible to build
and link Kerberos with imapfilter under win32?  And what about support
for foo that will use libbar tomorrow?  Of course, there is always Cygwin...

Lefteris

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