Re: Fwd: Plans for GTK+ Bundles for win32 and win64?

[Erik van Pienbroek <erik vanpienbroek nl>]

Op Thu, 08 Sep 2011 13:41:00 +0300, schreef Kalev Lember:
> There's also the option to go with cross-compiling from Linux. There are
> at least two separate efforts which use the gcc cross-compiler to
> produce ready-made binary Windows libraries, including the full GTK+
> stack.
> 
> In early 2009, Richard W.M. Jones started the Fedora MinGW project [1]
> which uses the mingw.org [2] runtime / libraries / headers. The idea was
> that there was too much fragmentation and duplication of work because at
> that time pretty much everybody had to build their own set of libraries;
> the Fedora MinGW project would make it easier by distributing binary
> library packages that everybody could reuse and contribute back to.

For the last couple of months various people in the Fedora MinGW project 
(including Kalev Lember and me) started to work on introducing the mingw-
w64 toolchain (version v2.0-rc1) and porting all current (about 110) mingw 
packages which are already in Fedora to generate both win32 as well as 
win64 binaries [1][2].

The most important difference between this effort and the OBS effort is 
the fact that both win32 and win64 binaries are built from the same .spec 
file (for the people who are not familiar with RPM: this is the file 
which contains instructions how a package must be built). This means that 
every time an upstream releases a new version of their software the 
package maintainer only has to update the package in one place instead of 
two places (like currently is the case with the OBS effort).

As an added bonus, we've also got a darwinx cross compiler! With the work 
we've done so far it is possible to generate win32, win64 and darwinx 
binaries at the same time using the same .spec file. Unfortunately we 
won't be able to add the darwinx cross compiler to the main Fedora 
repository because of the use of 'forbidden licenses' so this will have 
to remain in a separate repository for the time being, but that shouldn't 
be too much of an issue.

As already mentioned in another posting in this thread: the Fedora mingw-
w64 effort currently stalled because we're still waiting on approval from 
Red Hat Legal. That's why all development of testing of these packages is 
currently done in a testing repository. We expect that the legal approval 
will be given soon and once that is the case we can start merging 
everything from the testing repository back to the main Fedora repository 
so the packages will become part of the next Fedora release.

The list of mingw packages which are currently already part of Fedora can 
be found at [3].

Kind regards,

Erik van Pienbroek


[1]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW/CrossCompilerFramework
[2]: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/fedora-mingw/2011-
January/003285.html
[3]: http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/search?
match=glob&type=package&terms=mingw*