Re: GTK+ 2.0/3.0 Windows runtimes

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Hi;

On Tue, 23 Oct 2018 at 08:26, John Mills <johnmi effect net au> wrote:

> Hello list
>
> If this question should be raised on another list, please let me know.
>
> I have been developing a C-language GTK+ 2.0 application for MS Windows 10
> using mingw
> cross-compilation on Linux, and deploying it by installing the Windows
> GTK+ 2.0 runtime
> bundle on the Windows machine.
> http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/binaries/win32/
>
> The procedure was: on Linux development machine, unzip the gtk Windows
> bundle in a directory
> with the C source, set up a Makefile with the appropriate CFLAGS and
> LDFLAGS, 'make mingw'
> and deploy the EXE. This procedure suited my development style.
>
> Do I now need to port to GTK+ 3?

Considering that GTK 2.x is now in deep maintenance mode, you're strongly
encouraged to migrate to GTK 3.24 — if and only if you're interested and
have enough design and maintenance effort for the migration, and if you
need functionality that is just never going to happen in the GTK 2.x branch.

If you don't have any particular requirement, and you don't have enough
bandwidth to migrate, then you can keep using GTK 2.24; it's not going to
go away.

Is MSYS2 now the best/only way to deploy the dependencies to Windows?
>

MSYS2 is the recommended way to *develop* an application using GTK 3.24 on
Windows, natively. GTK developers are not going to ship binary builds for
you, as we don't have the resources to do so—on any platform, in any case,
not just on Windows.

In order to ship GTK applications on Windows to your users you're strongly
encouraged to take the builds you made and put them into an installer
binary; your users do not need MSYS2.


> Using the binaries available through MSYS2/pacman, can I still develop on
> Linux and deploy
> mingw executables to Windows?

You can still cross-compile on Linux for Windows; many Linux distributions
have mingw packages to accomplish just that. The recommendation is still to
package up your binary builds into an installer, and ship the installer to
your users.


> Can anyone point me to a guide for doing that?

There are various GTK applications that have build and release scripts for
Windows; gedit and hexchat come to mind:

  - https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gedit/tree/master/win32
  - https://github.com/hexchat/hexchat/tree/master/win32

For Linux/Windows cross-compilation there are distro-specific tutorials:

  - Fedora: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW/Tutorial
  - Debian: https://wiki.debian.org/Mingw-W64

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
https://www.bassi.io
[@] ebassi [@gmail.com]