Re: Updated GTK+ 2.24.5 binaries (and bundle)

[Dieter Verfaillie <dieterv optionexplicit be>]

On 12/07/2011 18:02, Krzysztof Kosiński wrote:
> I worked on a cross platform build system for Inkscape. Currently we
> use Autotools on Unix-like platforms and a custom build tool on
> Windows. because we decided that we cannot depend on MSYS. Here are my
> $0.02:
> 
> The whole raison d'etre of MSYS is to allow Autotools to work.

Observing mingw-users list I'm getting the impression the mingw.org
(and thus MSYS) devs are slowly starting to change their worldview
on that. There's even an effort to build a real msys-git port going
on...

> Once you get rid of Autotools, you no longer need MSYS.

Fair enough, using a custom build tool on Windows is your choice,
not mine ;)

And to be clear, for those of us that do not get to choose their
OS (but thank $DEITY are free to choose their tools) MinGW/MSYS
at least provides something of a sane environment...

> And if you are
> serious about portability, you need to get rid of Autotools anyway,

I prefer to think that there's a reason nobody seems to be in a hurry
to port the whole of GNOME's platform away to cmake, waf, scons, etc...

> because the last available version of MSYS Perl can no longer run the
> recent automake releases. 

Comparing... (both from an MSYS bash session in "MinGW mode" and
"MSYS System Builder mode"):
$ automake --version
automake (GNU automake) 1.11.1
<snipped>

...with ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/automake/ leads me to believe that
1.11.1 is indeed the most recent version of automake?

Also msys-perl has been updated. Check this thread:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.mingw.user/36263
There a good chance most intltool vs (Active)Perl hacks/workarounds
described all over the net to get a working MinGW/MSYS build system
for the GNOME platform going are no longer valid.

At least I didn't need any of those intltool vs Perl hacks any more
and have not encountered any trouble with automake building these
GTK+ 2.24.5 packages nor while building libffi-3.0.10rc8,
pkg-config-0.25, glib master, gobject-introspection master, py2cairo
via autotools now that it's setup.py has been removed and it's waf
system refuses to cooperate and pygobject with gi support again via
autotools.

> This makes building from a source checkout
> (not a tarball) on Windows impossible.

Read above. No offense but either your information is seriously
outdated, you used an ancient version (the old automated installer?)
or you had a flaw in your MinGW/MSYS setup somewhere.

Anyway, this is getting off-topic. I'm going back to my original
question now...

mvg,
Dieter