> From: Costas Argyris <costas.argy...@gmail.com> > Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2023 23:04:52 +0100 > Cc: bug-make@gnu.org > > > Should we fail here? Or should we build without UTF-8 support since we > > don't have a resource compiler? I think that's what the configure > > version does, right? > > You are right, that was an inconsistency on my part, sorry about that. > It's true that the configure version is optional on this, whereas > build_w32.bat errors out. > > I think the answer depends on what is going to be the policy regarding > Make on Windows and UTF-8. If we want to claim that Make on Windows > has gone UTF-8, matching fully the Unix-based platforms, then it has to > be an error if it can't be built as such. My personal opinion is that this > is the way forward, because it may be confusing if we end up in a > situation where some users have a UTF-8 version of Make and some > others don't.
Being able to know whether UTF-8 is supported or not is a valid concern. How about adding this information to what "make --version" shows? > I think just go full UTF-8 like the other systems. But it isn't "full UTF-8", as we have established during the discussions. MS-Windows is not yet ready for that, even in its latest versions. > Of course, users on versions of Windows earlier than the target version > that supports this feature still won't get UTF-8, but that would be because > of their version of Windows, not because of the way Make was built. Right. > That is, I am more inclined to make the configure version also error > out if windres was not found, than to make build_w32.bat optional. I'm of the opposite opinion. > This is mostly based on the fact that windres is part of binutils which is > pretty much ubiquitous because gcc itself relies on its tools (most > notably the assembler and linker). So if someone is building with > gcc, they will almost certainly already have windres. For building > with MSVC that's a non-issue because MSVC comes bundled with its > own resource compiler, so it is always going to be there. Then this is a non-issue: the error will not happen except in some situations we cannot imagine. > So I think it is reasonable to expect that there is always going to be a > resource compiler available. Even if not, say, when building with tcc, > it is always possible to error out with a message saying to install binutils. I'd like to avoid annoying users with requests to install something they did well without previously. Some would consider this a regression.
