Re: Testing GLib cross compilation

["J. Ali Harlow" <ali avrc city ac uk>]

On 2002.12.13 16:57 Owen Taylor wrote:

[snip re. testing linux-x-mingw build with 2.1 series]

> I wanted to get the cross-compilation changes in before 2.2.0 to
> prevent the patches from further getting out of sync with GLib,
> but I don't really see making particular cross-compiles work as
> a goal for this release.

OK, cool. I think I can get back to it in January.

> IMO, docs are really the most important missing element at this
> point; there's a lot of stuff going on in the win32 build
> that isn't at all obvious for someone coming from Unix.

You're right. Part of the problem with documenting what I've done
is that I've had to create the whole build system (heavily based
on what others have done, of course, but not quite as simple as
just downloading and installing a standard cross-compiler and
what-have-you). To make any sense of documenting how I build
Gtk+, I'd really need to document the whole process. Mostly I
just offer my build scripts to people and they can read them for
themselves :-)

>  How interesting is cross-compilation to win32? Probably not
>  *that* interesting, since I'd expect most development on the
>  win32 backend to be done by people with only win32.

There's two different things here of course. Being able to
cross-compile applications which use Gtk+ is vital for my
plans to port our applications from DOS to Win32 since I
develop everything under UNIX and rely heavily on a propriety
software engineering system that would make building under
win32 completely unacceptable. Actually being able to compile
Gtk+ itself is nothing like as important, but without it I
loose most of the benefits of open source; I can't fix bugs,
I can't hack Gtk+ to help me debug my application and I have
to wait for Tor to build everything (no disrespect to Tor, but
when I've got a deadline I don't want to be relying on anyone
else but me).

>  But for someone coming from Linux/Unix, like me, there is
>  certain appeal to something that gets cygwin, multiple
>  interacting path systems, and 5 minute configure runs out
>  of the equation.

There's that too, of course.

--
Ali Harlow                              Email: ali avrc city ac uk
Research programmer                     Tel:   (020) 7040 4348
Applied Vision Research Centre          Intl: +44 20 7040 4348
City University                         Fax:   (020) 7040 5515
London                                  Intl: +44 20 7040 5515