windres vs. wrc

[Dmitry Timoshkov]

"Dimitrie O. Paun" <dpaun at rogers.com> wrote:

> However, here are some points to ponder:
>   -- all Win32 free software projects out there use windres, not wrc
>   -- for this reason, it is like it's more generic / better maintained
>   -- do we want eventually to phase one of them out?
>   -- their command line arguments are incompatible. This causes
>      problems when trying to build portable Makefiles. 
>      Should we try to be command line compatible with windres, so
>      we are a drop in replacement (for the .rc/.res -> .o conversion)?
> 
> Any windres experiences? Comments?

Here are some windres limitations I'm aware of:

1. it knows nothing about unicode and therefore can't correctly compile
   resources with languages apart from English.
2. at least an year ago it generated wrongly aligned RCDATA sections,
   which affects all winmm resources in Wine.
3. it can't compile 16-bit resources, which is a critical feature for Wine.

#1 renders windres completely unusable for us.

In the past there were some patches for windres from the ReactOS guys, but
AFAIK nothing related to the above bugs.

.res -> .o conversion (which windres is able to do) is very valueable
for all Windows based projects. WRC is not able to do it.

WRC was made to be somewhat compatible with Microsoft resource compiler
in using command line switches. That's not the case for windres.

-- 
Dmitry.