[BuildTools] --enable-doscompile

[Ted Ralphs]

Andreas Waechter wrote:

>> 1. There are some features of SYMPHONY that do not work otherwise, and
>> most users will not dig around enough to realize how they should
>> change this.

> What are the things that don't work with mingw compiler?  Maybe we can
> fix that?

The big thing that doesn't work is signal catching, but I think some of
the timing subroutines also don't work. There may be some other things
I'm forgetting. I don't think there's anything that can be done. There
just isn't native support for it in Windows and mingw can only use stuff
that is supported natively.

>> 2. If you are using CYGWIN, rather than Visual C++ Express, you are
>> probably planning to run the code from within CYGWIN (and want that
>> features provided therein). In this case, why would you care about the
>> dependence on CYGWIN.dll?
> 
> I disagree here.  For Ipopt and Bonmin, people usually want to generate
> the AMPL solver executable, and that one doesn't work with Cygwin. 
> Also, the executables seem to behave funny with the Cygwin.dll (e.g.,
> output is flushed irregularly, and I think it is also slower).

Yes, I have seen this trouble with the output flushing irregularly, too.
It must be a bug, but I think I fixed it in SYMPHONY by expressly flush
the output somehow. I can look at it again if you are interested...

> Another reason NOT to use the Cygwin.dll by default is that we usually
> try to avoid unnecessary linkage with libraries that come with a
> different licence (e.g., by default, Clp is not using the readline
> library etc).

Well, yes, there's that, but that's really only an issue for folks who
are planning to redistribute binaries and who don't realize that some
incompatible code was statically linked in. This can't happen with
CYGWIN.dll. You would have to intentionally redistribute it, and there'd
be no reason to do that.

But I think you already have your mind made up, so I'll stop trying to
change it :).

Cheers,

Ted
-- 
Dr. Ted Ralphs
Associate Professor
Industrial and Systems Engineering
Lehigh University
(610)758-4784
tkralphs at lehigh.edu
www.lehigh.edu/~tkr2