I'd like to make it really easy for Windows users to aid linux users by providing distcc as a service.
Is it possible to compile distcc on win32 so it can run as a standalone .exe binary? Do you need something like MS VisualC++ to do this? Alternatively is all that is needed is the cygwin compiled binary and the cygwin .dll? How has progress been on getting this included? Can it be installed as a service? I take it that it can be run at a low priority so as to not interfere with other programs, but how?
I've been working on exactly what you're thinking of. Here's where I am at the moment: I have a script which will build just about any version of gcc and glibc crosscompilers targeting Linux (any CPU type) plus distcc/distccd, and sets up a masquerade directory which makes it easy to run distcc. The script runs successfully on Mac OS X, Cygwin, and Linux for gcc-3.3.3/glibc-2.3.2. I'm now trying to get it to also compile gcc-2.95.3 on Cygwin and Mac OS X (it's built that on Linux for a long time already). I'll be posting the script in a week or so.
On Windows, I had not yet investigated how to install the compiler, but I think all that's needed is to zip up the cygwin directory and unpack it on each machine which wants to run the service (or maybe it can be run off a shared network drive). Might also need to put the cygwin DLL in the windows directory, but I hope not. (Note that if the user already has cygwin, this can cause real conflicts.)
Then to set it up as a Win XP service, I was hoping there's a simple wrapper that could start either cygwin init or distccd directly as a Windows service. A commercial wrapper is at http://www.firedaemon.com/ and I seem to recall one came with the NT resource kit. Alternately, maybe cygwin init has already had a wrapper built for it; I haven't looked.
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