Has anyone tried to build the msvc port of 3.09.1?

Has anyone tried to build the msvc port of 3.09.1?

[Robert Roessler]

I can not make it build and install properly.  While I never tried 
3.09.0 (since the binary distribution was out so soon), I have 
previously built members of the 3.08 series without incident...

As suggested, I use the Cygwin shell and commands with VC7.1 (.NET 
2003) command-line tools.

Before you look too closely, things seem OK - then you realize that 
the ".opt" versions of commands are not in the bin dir.  The usual 
complement is present, including ocaml.exe, ocamlc.exe, ocamlopt.exe, 
etc... note that OCamlWin.exe insists that it cannot find ocaml.exe 
(even though the OCaml bin dir *is* on the path).  Note that ocaml.exe 
*can* be successfully started and used.

Looking at the build output for "make -f Makefile.nt install", there 
are some obvious (I believe) errors in two of the Makefiles: $(RANLIB) 
is used as a command, but since no corresponding tool exists on the 
platform (and the variable is left unassigned), this results in the 
target file "gramlib.lib" being presented *as a command* to /bin/sh... 
hacking these two by forcing RANLIB=true (to get an innocuous command 
which "succeeds") gets past these errors, but overall, the "install" 
target still does not complete.

BTW, these are the Makefiles in camlp4/lib and camlp4/ocaml_src/lib, 
in sections which include the suspicious (but not obviously related in 
this instance) comment "# Special treatment for this one...".

Ideally, either someone will point out the error of my ways (and no, 
"using Windows" is not the answer to this one), or the non-building 
status of 3.09.1 will be confirmed... with a fix forthcoming from the 
team or community.

Of course, if a binary distribution for 3.09.1 magically appeared, it 
would be nice... but it wouldn't really solve the problem. ;)

Robert Roessler
roessler@rftp.com
http://www.rftp.com