Hi,

as some of you might have learned from the last release announcement, it should now be possible to compile babl on Microsoft Windows ("on" being a MinGw+Msys-based build environment).

There's one problem remaining - right now, babl builds without extensions and extension loading is disabled. This is because the dlopen, dlsym and dlclose functions are used, which are not available on the platform.

There are some options how this might be overcome:

1. Add win32 specific code

Either directly in the source files or as dl* replacements by some autoconf magic. Probably doable, but feels like duplicated effort.

2. Use GNU libltdl

libltdl is a portable wrapper around loading dynamic libraries. It's described in
http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/autobook/autobook_164.html and is supposed to be usable on many (all?) platforms. It has to be added to project as source and will be built with it.

3. use libgw32c

This is a minimal reimplementation of glibc for Win32. This has been introduced to babl by myself initially, but I never managed to build babl as a shared lib and has thus been removed again.

4. use gmodule This would add a dependency to glib, which is not desired.

Any opinions and suggestions welcome.

Michael