[Freeciv] Native Win32 port of Freeciv

[hop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Hello all,

I'm interested in doing a native Win32 port of Freeciv and I just thought
I'd float this idea out to all you freeciv developers and maintainers. My
reasons for wanting this over the freeciv/cygwin work at 
http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Corner/2874/ are because cygwin is
big, kindof slow, and still beta quality. Furthermore, the cygwin/freeciv
stuff needs an X server to work, which will further slow it down. (Not to
mention that you may need a commercial Xserver to get it working)

So the real reason that I'm writing is because I'm wondering how you would
react to this. Porting the client will require some uncomfortable changes
to the code - either an abstraction layer implemented differently by two
different sections of code (X11 and Win32 sections) or an entirely different
distribution. Either way is fine with me, but if we go for the separate
distribution thing, it'll be somewhat painful to move the Win32 client from 
version to version.

Or, another option will be to use Gtk+ on win32 (which is still beta), but 
I'm not sure if this is the only non-portable section of the code.
Specifically, 
I'm worried about the networking code on Win32.

Thoughts?

Justin Hopkins