Re: Windows dev-* environment

[Vlad Grecescu <b100dian gmail com>]

On 10/7/2008 1:47 AM, Cody Russell wrote:

On Mon, 2008-10-06 at 23:47 +0300, Vlad Grecescu wrote:
  

I think most of the people that use Gtk+ on Windows also use
autoconf/automake (think Inkscape, Geany, Pidgin). Unfortunately they
also use parralel Makefiles for win32.. having the opportunity to
compile unmodified (vanilla) Gtk+ software in msys/mingw seems like a
good idea to me.

Also, Visual Studio for new projects is another target, but I think
the difference is weather you're mainly developing on WIndows and
regulary checking if it works on Linux/*nix etc. or the other way
around.
    

I'm not thinking in terms of "the people that use Gtk+ on Windows" right
now.  They do what they do because there aren't many options, or because
they're developing Linux applications primarily but want to build them
on Windows.  Building applications using autoconf/automake/make on
Windows is extremely slow and painful, so in my opinion it makes for a
very sub-optimal development environment, but if you're primarily
developing on Linux it is tolerable for just building Windows binaries.
But when I compile the Gtk+ stack, I cross-compile with mingw on Linux
because it is probably 10 times faster (no, I didn't actually measure
the time I'm just taking a wild guess).

I think once the MSM/MSI projects are upstream, they'll be useful for
people developing on Windows with mingw.  But mostly I think they'll be
useful for distributing GTK-based applications.  The problem, as I see
it right now, is that there are a lot of applications that each bundle
GTK in their own way; they each have to figure out how to make
installers to distribute their apps.  You end up with five copies of Gtk
all over your system, all different versions.  I hear rumors that some
apps do some custom patching of Gtk on Windows, but I'm not sure how
true that is.  I think (and hope) that by encouraging an official
installer we can minimize that type of behavior, and encourage bug
reports into Bugzilla, etc.  Also people can stop focusing on the
distribution problems so much and just focus on writing awesome
applications with Gtk+.  (if you want to grab my current MSI build, I've
posted it at http://bzr.medsphere.com/~cody/installers/ - let me know if
it's working okay for you with mingw and stuff if you like.. it's not
the latest version of Gtk+ yet.. I'll update it this weekend in Boston).
  

Great - I just tried it. It installed without issue.
I did however had to install pkg-config.exe manually (it does not come with mingw/msys)
Then I simply added the gtksharp's /bin, /lib/, /include and /lib/pkg-config to the appropriate environment paths in MSYS's profile.d and I tried to build vala-0.3.4

The ./configure script worked flawlessly.
However the link step failed with

libtool: link: warning: library `c:/gtksharp/lib/libgobject-2.0.la' was moved.
grep: /home/cody/cross-build/2.12/lib/libglib-2.0.la: No such file or directory
/bin/sed: can't read /home/cody/cross-build/2.12/lib/libglib-2.0.la: No such file or directory
libtool: link: `/home/cody/cross-build/2.12/lib/libglib-2.0.la' is not a valid libtool archive

I am not that expert in libtool but it seemed to me that deleting the installed lib/*.la files fixed the problem.

So there, so far your MSI would be exactly what I would want!:)
And since you're going to have MSMs for Visual Studio, that will make it a single solution for both kinds of developers.

Thanks

-- 
Vlad