I remember the first time I installed the ODE dynamics library on a Windows machine. "What do you mean, I need GNU Make?" Then the configurator ran, or rather tried to, and my jaw just hung open for the rest of the afternoon.
At that point I understood why Microsoft still has a positive balance sheet.
Slightly off-topic, but if you're installing ODE on Windows, you're in for a world of hurt. I never had the chance to try any other dynamics packages that build on Windows, but I'd recommend shying away from ODE; this is a "devil I know, devil I don't" situation where the devil I know is pretty evil.
You'll find that ODE can be downright Windows-hostile in pieces of its implementation that have nothing to do with GNU toolchain issues. Take a look at http://www.ode.org/old_list_archives/2003-October/010046.htm... for the most common problem; they don't care that the stack has different restrictions in Windows and Linux. You'll also find ODE to be downright thread-hostile; the entire library is non-reentrant (they built their own non-threadsafe layer on top of malloc inside the engine; you can't trust any two functions to be callable from separate threads, even if they have logically nothing to do with each other).
ODE is the first physics package most people seem to suggest, but I think it's more trouble than it's worth.
Isn't the standard practice on windows to rely on the supplier's final binary version? Since you have a limited set (7, vista, xp) to care about and they're sometimes the same, why would you actually compile third party libs like that?
Most of the libs I've used under VC had their own build files for just that environment exactly because you don't really need all the autoconf / make crap in there. This doesn't have anything to do with MS's balance sheets imho, simply because you'd have a much better experience compiling gnu make-based ODE libs under a ...nix system. The things you have to fight with so much create a build system, which you can take for granted on a target system (as in `apt-get install build-essentials`).
Your issue seems to me orthogonal to what the article is about, on many levels. Spending more time in ...nix environments, I could just as well wonder: "Why is it so hard to have a sane POSIX-friendly, command-line build environment in MS systems? At that point I don't understood why Microsoft still has a positive balance sheet."
Isn't the standard practice on windows to rely on the supplier's final binary version? Since you have a limited set (7, vista, xp) to care about and they're sometimes the same, why would you actually compile third party libs like that?
If the project maintainer doesn't include binaries, and nobody else posts them, then the user doesn't have a choice.
At that point I understood why Microsoft still has a positive balance sheet.