[ofw] RE: [ofa-general] porting IB management code to Windows

[Sean Hefty]

>Just to chime in here with some past experience.. Is there any way it
>would be acceptable to use gcc (or even the Intel compiler) as the
>mandatory Windows C compiler?  That would save everyone alot of
>ongoing hassle. MS does not maintain the C compiler portion of VC++
>and it is very old standards wise, half your changes in this patch are
>due to it not supporting C99.

I installed the Intel compiler (version 11.0.066) and tried using that within
the WDK build environment to build just sminfo.  The good news is that sminfo
did build within the WDK environment and run.  The bad news is that every change
to sminfo.c that was posted was still needed by the Intel compiler, plus it
required a couple of other changes as well.  :(

I didn't spend any time looking into the compile issues, so I don't know if
changing the build environment would eliminate some of the changes.  I also did
not try using gcc on Windows.   (Btw, I think we can fix the const issue.)  I
would like to avoid the other changes, but it's not looking like it will happen.

>So, really what you are proposing is to abandon all modern C
>constructs in the offical source tree :| Some of this is acutally
>harmful run-time wise (like removing const on the static variables)
>and harmful maintenance wise (removing C99 named initalizers)

What I'm really proposing is that the IB management utilities package support
both Linux and Windows.  The alternative is to have independent packages with
separate source code bases.  And unless there's a way to eliminate the changes,
they'll be there.  I just don't know where there is yet.

Btw, Arlin can provide more details on the other required changes.  We only have
a few of the diags ported at this time (i.e. the easiest ones to port).

- Sean