Re: Gnat cross compiling FreeBSD to Win32 ?

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar) writes:

> "Robert R. Beaver" <beaveroregon@qwest.net> wrote in message news:<3CD54D8C.3020302@qwest.net>...

>> Yes, I run FreeBSD only. I would like to make my programs work on
>> both. I do not usualy write for win32.
>
> Using a cross-compiler is an inappropriate and complex
> way of addressing your problem. My advice is to completely
> forget this approach it makes no sense.

Why do you think so?  I wouldn't use a cross compiler for Windows-only
projects, but I can imagine to use one in the context of a
multiplatform project.  Quite a few of the tools I like do not run at
all on Windows, or only after careful investigation and/or substantial
tweaking (decent editors accessible over SSH come to my mind as an
example).

My first and only Windows Ada project (and one of my few Ada programs
which are actually in production use, although this program features
are rather uniqe time bomb) was really tiny, and copying the source
files to a Windows box for compilation was an option, but I don't
think this works with larger projects.  Curiously enough, I started
with a C cross compiler on a Debian system, but I soon discovered that
the import libraries lacked several undocumented functions, that's why
I thought I could use Ada as well (I tried to use C first because I
assumed I wouldn't have to deal with manually importing functions from
DLLs).