Re[2]: Re[2]: Compiling for Windows [Was: argv revisited]

["Andrew Robinson" <arobinson18 cox net>]

There are many ways to have good gtk3 binaries for Windows:


- if you are using mingw you can fetch updated gtk3 binaries from msys2
(https://github.com/Alexpux/MSYS2-packages)

- if you are cross compling Fedora and other distros provide mingw binaries

- if you are using MSVC, there are no pre-built binaries, but
https://github.com/wingtk/gtk-win32 provides a script to build them easily

We decided to not distribute binaries from gtk.org/gnome.org anymore since we
do not have the resources to do that for all the possible platforms and
toolchain combinations. Other projects like msys2 are much better equipped to
provide binaries (and this is the same on linux where binaries are provided by
distros).

The website, https://github.com/wingtk/gtk-win32, looks really good at first
glance, until you read the fine print where it says, "Any version of VS apart
from 2013 is not supported". What if I don't have VS 2013, what then? You
can't download it from Microsoft's website although you can buy it for $400+
from Amazon. If I bought it, I would either have to have another computer to
install it on, or uninstall the current version I have so I could install the
2013 version and be sure it was "bug free". No thank you.

Mingw doesn't have any binaries for GTK+, it is a compiler and you have to
download 27 sub-projects that the GTK+ toolkit is comprised of, then compile
them all with the (hopefully) proper command line switches to get binaries. It
is a laborious and a very, very poorly documented process. Again, no thank
you.

I have never seen a cross-compiled version of Fedora. Is it related to the
mythical Chimera?

PS -- The only help the GTK+ Project has ever offered the Windows community
for obtaining GTK+ for Windows is their weblink instructing you to download
MSYS2 ... the end! No mention of which of the 27+ sub-projects are required to
compile the entire GTK+ toolkit suite, or what developer tools are required,
or how to do any of it. So if something were to go wrong during the compile, I
would not expect the GTK+ Project to be there to offer any help. Even if GTK+
had listed https://github.com/wingtk/gtk-win32 for instructions, I would have
been impressed -- disappointed -- but still impressed.