Re: [Mingw-cross-env-list] Request for OSS support

[Enoch]

Tony Theodore <address@hidden> writes:

> On 13/02/2013, at 5:24 PM, Enoch <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>     Have a look at recent discussion at
>     <http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.cad.geda.user/41063> "[geda-user]
>     crosscompile for windows with minipack" and the inadequacy of minipack
>     would become apparent.
>    
>     DJ Delorie, a famous OSS guy, auto builds at
>     http://www.delorie.com/pcb/geda-windows/ but it is always trailing after
>     the Linux offering.
>    
>     Also, I don't think that any of the developers is "emotionally invested"
>     in minipack.
>
> There seems to be a bit of activity in the minipack recently, so possibly 
> they are working on it.
>
> The gd patches you mentioned here:
>
> https://github.com/mxe/mxe/issues/70
>
> seem to be focussed on building a dll. mxe's main focus (currently) is on 
> static builds, and I'm not sure that the static version of gtk2 really works 
> for non-trivial applications. Things may have changed,
> but some time ago there was no-one actually using it:
>
> http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/mingw-cross-env-list/2011-03/msg00002.html
>
> There are plans to eventually support shared library builds but there's no 
> telling when this will happen - any help in that direction is welcome.

I believe that your focus on static builds is the correct approach!  MXE
is used to port a single OSS project to Windows (those who use lots of
OSS would better move to Linux).  Accordingly, shared libraries would
not save code space but would bring us just nearer to "shared libraries
hell", that of conflicting versions.

Thanks, Enoch.


>
> You mentioned that it sort of works - I wonder if this is related to the 
> static build. The gd patches can be applied by dropping them in the src/ 
> directory and prefixing each file with gd. If you then go
> along and try removing the --disable-shared options on all it's dependencies, 
> the build may get a lot further along.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Tony