Issues raised by the red windows build

[Mats Lidell]

Hi,

I thought it was time to turn the last red build into a green one. We
have had that one for a very long time. I thought it would be a simple
type mismatch that possibly could be handled with a cast. But...

When I looked into it I realized it was much harder and that it raises
a number of questions.

 - First of all the problem is the same with the other windows builds
   but these are built with gcc and the one that fails is built with
   g++. c++ is a bit harder on type mismatch causing errors instead of
   warnings.

   Conclusion: All windows builds ought to be fixed.

 - Fixing it is both easy and hard.

   - Fixing it is hard because unicode support on windows seems to be
     a can of worms.

     If I get it right we are also trying hard to build one binary
     that will work on all windows flavors going back to Windows-98
     (or even further?) This doesn't make things easier.

     The current cygwin version has dropped support for the old
     versions of windows. This raises the question.

     Q: Can we drop that support to?

     Since I don't understand the code fully I'm not sure but it feels
     like that your code will be simpler if we could drop the runtime
     check on Windows version. Later versions of Windows might have
     more stable APIs making our code even simpler?

   - Fixing it is easy because these functions that causes the error
     isn't used!?

     We could simply remove them. If I get it right there is in
     intl-auto-encap-win32.c and intl-encap-win32.c a small framework
     for supporting windows APIs that could potentially be used. So
     they are ready to be used once we need them. It also has trip
     wires to alert you when using the wrong function names.

     Am I missing something here? Are they maybe useful for users
     writing there own modules so removing them would be a bad idea? 
     
     Is the framework really paying of? It seems strange to me to have
     a bunch of loose functions hanging around. (If I fix the error
     how would I know that I did it right?) But I guess once I would
     need a function in the framework I would be grateful that it was
     already provided (if it was implemented right that is!)

Yours
-- 
%% Mats