Bob Jamison wrote:
Correct. The average poor M$ Windows victim does not have automake/autoconf available.
Well, that sounded curt and smug. :-) .
Let me explain this better. IS/SP has always been buildable on Win32. The problem with the SP build, though, was that the Win32 builder had to download and configure a lot of things to make it to work. Mingw, MSYS, automake, autoconf, pkg-config, the codepages, etc. He would spend more time on THAT than the actual code.
What a pain for the average developer/user who merely wants to make Inkscape do what he wants it to do. Why waste days and days getting it to compile, when the developer would rather be working on the program itself?
So we spent several weeks collecting libraries, building others, installing the codepages into the source (which we can delete soon because of Pango) and creating a set of clean makefiles that work on Win9x, NT, XP, and the Linux cross-compiler. It is a bit more work for people like me, but hopefully it attains its goal of saving a lot of work for other people.
Also, remember that on Unix/Linux, $PREFIX is commonly /usr/local or /usr or something like that. On M$, all of a program's files are typically located in their own directory. So all of the files are located relative to ".". Actually, relative to the .exe that is currently running.
.....anyway, just wanted to explain that there is a reason for the Win32 build to be constructed in such a manner, and that we haven't just been arbitrary.
hth
I will check with the admin to see why the name server does not have the new address yet.
Bob (ishmal)