To build ORBit2 on Win32 you must use gcc (mingw). Using MSVC does not
work without some major restructuring in they way type codes etc is
exported from the ORBit2 DLLs. ORBit2 and code produced by its IDL
compiler depend heavily on the --enable-auto-import (which is on by
default) and --enable-runtime-pseudo-reloc (which isn't) features of
the GNU linker. The same holds for building software that uses ORBit2
itself or DLLs containing code produced by ORBit2's IDL compiler (for
instance libbonobo).

Personally I build ORBit2 using a command sequence like the one below
that corresponds to my (unofficial) source and binary release on
2005-08-28. Obviously you need to adapt it to where you have various
dependencies installed, and otherwise. Just use this as a model. Don't
use it blindly, but try to understand what each step does and why it
is needed.

----------------
THIS=ORBit2-2.13.0-20050828
DEPS="glib-2.8.1 libIDL-0.8.6"
sed -e 's/need_relink=yes/need_relink=no # no way --tml/' <ltmain.sh >ltmain.temp && mv ltmain.temp ltmain.sh
# This sets PATH and PKG_CONFIG_PATH to "base" values that don't include
# things in the GNOME platform, but does include things like libintl or popt.
usestable 
unset MY_PKG_CONFIG_PATH
for D in $DEPS; do
    PATH=/devel/dist/$D/bin:$PATH
    MY_PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/devel/dist/$D/lib/pkgconfig:$MY_PKG_CONFIG_PATH
done
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$MY_PKG_CONFIG_PATH:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH CC='gcc -mtune=pentium3' CPPFLAGS='-I/opt/gnu/include -I/devel/dist/popt-1.10.2-tml-20050828/include' LDFLAGS='-Wl,--enable-runtime-pseudo-reloc -L/opt/gnu/lib -L/devel/dist/popt-1.10.2-tml-20050828/lib' CFLAGS=-O ./configure  --enable-debug=yes --disable-gtk-doc --disable-static --prefix=c:/devel/target/$THIS &&
libtoolcacheize &&
unset MY_PKG_CONFIG_PATH &&
PATH=/devel/target/$THIS/bin:.libs:$PATH make install &&
rm .libtool-cache-link-exe &&
(cd test && PATH=/devel/target/$THIS/bin:$PATH make check) &&
./ORBit2-zip
----------------

Things to note above are:

- If you build with optimization, you must pass the
  --enable-runtime-pseudo-reloc flag to the linker. Otherwise the
  (default) --enable-auto-import is enough.

- /opt/gnu is where I have GNU libintl installed

- /devel/dist/* are folders which contain the exact contents of
  the zipped packages I distribute. Others probably shouldn't have any
  reason to unzip each package in a separate folder. I use those in
  the build sequence just to make sure everything needed from the
  dependencies are included in the zipfiles of the dependencies.

- /devel/target/* are separate folders into which I run make install
  for each module. I don't use anything from there when building other
  stuff, though, but from the corresponding /devel/dist/* folder into
  which I only unzip the actual contents of the zipfiles I am going to
  distribute. This way I make sure that there are no leftover
  dependencies on built-in compile-time pathnames in the binaries.

--Tor Lillqvist <tml@novell.com>, <tml@iki.fi>