ObviousGuy's Journal: I got no chickens. I got no eggs.

Like the age old question, "How can I get a job without experience? And how can I get experience without a job?", I've run into another chicken and egg problem.

Let's start at the beginning.

I need to write a utility that we can use in-house that diffs our set of files with our customer's. Hey, I know Perl, I could probably whip up something pretty quickly and have it workable in a couple days. And, you know, there's CPAN which will make my job a whole lot easier with pre-made modules and whatnot.

So I hop over to CPAN and lo and behold there's exactly what I'm looking for.
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Text::Diff
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Yay!

So I load up CPAN.

>install Text::Diff

Can't do it. There's some code to be compiled and I don't have make. Apparently VC++'s nmake.exe isn't good enough.

Whatever, no problem. Just install good old Cygwin to fill all my Unix needs.

Cygwin's installed now, CPAN should be happy and I'll be on my way to a better life in the Bahamas when this program saves my company tons of time and money and my stock options come up for air.

Wrong again! Cygwin doesn't come with make. It doesn't come with gcc either. Being the smart programmer that I am, I know I'll need a compiler so I hop over to GNU's website and download the latest gcc tarball.

Slow down there, Cowboy. gcc requires you to have make installed. Well, I guess it makes sense...

Hop over to the GNU make page and get that tarball. I think I finally have a handle on this now...

Unfortunately, I don't have ld anywhere in my path. And fuck me if I don't have it on my computer anywhere.

When I finally do scrounge up the linker off some site on the web, it turns out I don't have the proper compilers to actually build make. Well, no shit Sherlock. That's what I was trying to build in the first place.

So I am stuck now with the sources to gcc and the sources to make and neither the twain shall build.

I guess my question is, "Why doesn't Cygwin package gcc and make in their install?"

But that's really secondary to my main problem which is that I need to get binaries for gcc, make, and eventually Text::Diff.

Any suggestions?

http://www.mingw.org/

[Zarf]

Yay, google to the rescue again. I don't actually have a windows computer that I can play with but I figure that this (http://www.mingw.org/download.shtml) at least sounds like it will fill the bill from the FAQ (http://www.mingw.org/mingwfaq.shtml#faq-what).

I believe that your particular horror story is just like the same horror story I used to convince one of my bosses to put a Linux Server in our core.

Also, I've used Text::diff and didn't like it for some reason... that was several years ago, however. I think it had something to do with the code written with Text::diff taking up too much memory. I ended up parsing the out put from regular diff... wasn't too hard.

I can send you Win2K binaries.

[Xerithane]

I can send you the binaries for Text::Diff if you want.

As a disclaimer, I know barely more than a sloth knows of the Taj Mahal, but I can compile things under windows and follow instructions.

Let me know if you want it and I'll get it done for ya.

Re:I can send you Win2K binaries.

[ObviousGuy]

Thanks! I'm going to try out the mingw route first. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew about that project, but it totally slipped my mind.

However, it's the weekend, the wife is at work, so I'm playing Shutoko Battle [ntsc-uk.com]. I guess I should be cleaning or something... ;-)

Re:I can send you Win2K binaries.

[Xerithane]

However, it's the weekend, the wife is at work, so I'm playing Shutoko Battle.. I guess I should be cleaning or something... ;-)

I was playing that last weekend (US version) - fun game, but it's like Gran Turismo and the previous games. Soon as you get a couple fast cars, the game becomes very boring. Expect to lose maybe 150 races, then after that it's easy victories with no challenges.

You need to get Warcraft 3 or Battlefield 1942 :)