Microsoft Windows

2.6 Microsoft Windows / Microsoft Windows

In 1995, Microsoft released Windows 95, which soon became the most widely-used operating system in the world. Autoconf and Libtool were written to support portability across Unix variants, but they provided a framework to support portability to Windows as well. This made it possible for a program to support both Unix and Windows from a single source code base.

Microsoft 的 Windows 95 在 1995 年上市後，很快的變成世界上被廣泛使用的作業系統。 Autoconf 與 Libtool 除了提供在各種 Unix 分支版本的可攜性支援外，也提供了延伸可攜性支援到 Windows 上的程式設計框架，這使得透過單一份原始碼來同時支援 Unix 與 Windows 成為可能的事情。

The key requirement of both Autoconf and Libtool was the Unix shell. The GNU bash shell was ported to Windows as part of the Cygwin project, which was originally written by Steve Chamberlain. The Cygwin project implements the basic Unix API in Windows, making it possible to port Unix programs directly.

Autoconf 與 Libtool 都需要 Unix shell 程式，而 GNU bash shell 恰被作為 Cygwin 計畫的一部分移植到 Windows 上。 Cygwin 計畫是由 Steve Chamberlain 所發起的，這個計畫在 Windows 上實做了基本的 Unix API ，使得 Unix 程式可以直接的移植到 Windows 上。

Once the shell and the Unix make program (also provided by Cygwin) were available, it was possible to make Autoconf and Libtool support Windows directly, using either the Cygwin interface or the Visual C++ tools from Microsoft. This involved handling details like the different file extensions used by the different systems, as well as yet another set of shared library features. This first version of this work was by Ian Lance Taylor in 1998. Automake has also been ported to Windows. It requires Perl to be installed (see section A.1 Prerequisite tools).

在 shell 與 Unix 的 make 程式都被移植到 Windows 上之後，便可以讓 Autoconf 與 Libtool 透過 Cygwin 或是 Microsoft Visual C++ toolkit 直接的支援 Windows。增加 Windows 支援牽涉到處理一些在不同的作業系統上細節，例如處理不同的檔案延伸名稱以及額外的共享函式庫功能，第一個可以支援 Windows 的版本在 1998 年由 Ian Lance 所開發。除此之外 Automake 也被移植到 Windows 上，他需要 Perl 預先安裝在系統上 (參見 A.1 需預先安裝的工具) 。