Bill King wrote:

>
> I for one fully agree with this, i'm not going to install msvc, for the
> simple fact, I don't own it. I'm not even planning on purchasing it.

> Why rely on a commercial compiler,

Because it works. Now.

> when there are viable freeware compilers
> easily obtainable out there that work as well if not better(IMHO) than msvc?
> (bcc5.5, and cygwin/gcc for example).

The BCC5.5 support in the current build process has never been made to work, by
anyone. Feel free to try.

The Cygwin/GCC combination will never, ever, work because CygWin has built-in
Posix compliance (to make it really unix like).

For this reason the MinGW/gcc implementation exists. It uses the MSVCRT.DLL
(from the BoR). Unfortunately there is rather a large amount of work required to
make it work. First, someone needs to just make it work. Second, they need to
make it work properly and thirdly they need to integrate those changes into the
the existing cross-platform build process (ensuring that they don't break other
builds). The Firebird project is looking for volunteers to take this on. We'd
love to see an open source Win32 build using gcc.

In the meantime, for those just wanting to get on with building InterBase on
Win32 there is a tried and tested method that works out of the box.


Paul
--

Paul Reeves
http://www.ibphoenix.com
taking InterBase further