taglib on windows with visual studio

[Roel Vanhout]

Stefan Gehn wrote:
> LOL, is this a joke? I just did almost the same and posted it to the 
> list last week.

Yeah I saw that when going through the mailing list archives, but my 
previous email was already too long and I was tired so I just wanted to 
finish the mail instead of discussing your mail :)

>  > - There is no unistd.h on windows. That wasn't too bad, I just created a
> MinGW fixes that.

The thing is that I want a version that compiles on msvc without having 
to install a second compiler and supporting headers & libs. I'm not 
saying that a mingw port wouldn't be useful, just that it wouldn't be 
useful to me. I have seen on the mingw website that dll's generated with 
mingw can be called by msvc by creating a .lib from the .def that is 
generated by mingw; that would be a solution for users that want to use 
a binary released dll, but I still think it would be beneficial to 
provide build environments for both mingw and msvc so that users 
canbuild full msvc binaries.

>  > - Then finally, the biggest problem. Because of the license of taglib I
>  > needed to compile it as a dll. But on windows for the creation of dlls,
> The license wouldn't make a difference, linking to a dll is the same as
> linking in a static lib. And anyway, what's your problem? AFAIK linking
> taglib into a commercial application is ok because it's LGPL.

No, it's not the same. The LGPL requires users of the library to supply 
enough code for users to replace the LGPL library with a new or modified 
version. It also requires allowing reverse engineering for this purpose. 
Now if I use a dll, users can just compile a new dll with their 
modifications and be done with it. If I link the LGPL library statically 
with my application, I would have to provide object files of my whole 
application so that users can re-link with their modified version of the 
LGPL library (supplying the sources to my application would of course 
also be ok but it speaks for itself that if I don't want to supply 
object files I don't want to supply sources either).

> just get a testing tarball from my site and wait for the next taglib 
> release
> that will hopefully include win32-support and a binary-release. AFAIK 

Well that was part of my question: will the next release include the 
__declspec stuff, that is, is Scott willing to include it? Since I 
hadn't heard back about that after your posts I figured I'd post my 
situation to the list, actually still in the hope that I (or someone 
else) will find a way to create dll's (or use taglib in another way) 
without having to modify the sources at all.


cheers,

roel