basic win32 port

[Rémi Peyronnet]

> Let's consider the point of the compiler ; I heard from a generally
> well-informed source (well, remi and babal) that gcc for Windows is not

I never told that gcc was not that performant. Benchmarks show that gcc
is on the same level as VC, and that BCC has poor performance.
I consider that cygwin and mingw32 are good ideas for such a port. (I
found cygwin very easy to use, mingw32 a little bit more difficult, and
DJGPP awfull to use, but that's only my personal opinion:-)
But I told that many windows developpers use VC++, and that would be a
good idea to provide some configuration files for VC++. That would allow
pure windows programmers to build their own vlc.

> really that performant. The enormous advantage of gcc would be, but I'm
> not sure, the portability of the Makefiles. 

Yes, but only in an environment like cygwin. Because of the different
naming conventions (.o, .obj, -c, /c) this could probably cause some
problems. For instance, for another project, we use two different
Makefiles, and the windows Makefile will be soon automatically generated
from the linux Makefile, to comply with windows specific naming
conventions. We use #define WIN32 too, and that is very convenient, I
see no need to make a cvs branch.

I would add that many important cross-platforms projects have VC
configuration files, and two different Makefiles.

--
RP