Re: Provisioning a mingw native compile environment

[Maarten Bosmans <mkbosmans gmail com>]

2011/10/29 Sam Thursfield <ssssam gmail com>:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I guess it's about time to christen this mailing list.

Indeed. Let's get going.

> I'm looking at the best way of collating and providing a native mingw
> compile environment. I'm thinking up to and including jhbuild
> (everything beneath the Gnome platform, to put it another way). Since
> the situation with mingw.org, mingw-w64, msys etc. has got pretty
> confusing at the moment I think it's worth bundling all this together
> for people who want to do their own Windows builds.

If I understand all the latest developments correctly, I think there
is a convergence to two different approaches: Compiling everything
with some version of MSVC (on Window, obviously) and cross-compiling
the whole stack from Linux using mingw (mostly with the w64 variant, I
think). The former approach caters to Window developers that want to
build an app using free software libraries and the latter is better
suited for free software developers that want to publish binaries for
Windows.

In this landscape, I don't exactly see where msys/mingw on Windows
fits in. I've struggled with that setup in the past (possibly the
situation has improved somewhat in the meantime), and find that
cross-compiling is far easier. Can you explain what advantages this
approach brings over the other two?

> A separate goal which I'm not going to attempt now (I know Dieter has
> plans here too :) is to provide mingw-get packages for things *inside*
> the platform - I'm hoping that one day we will be able to say
> "download this compile environment, mingw-get install the Gnome
> platform libraries that you need, and build your app for Windows".

May I suggest (I know, I've suggested it in the past, but I guess I'm
just genuinly enthousiastic about it) to use the OpenSuSE Build
Service for this? Then you have a automated build environment (not
tied to anyones personal machine) and we can share the burden of
package maintainance. A first attempt at a download script can be
found at [1]. Obviously there's much to improve, both in the script
and in the software packaging, but you can already easily download
whole cross-compiled applications with all dependencies.

Maarten

1) https://github.com/mkbosmans/download-mingw-rpm