Re: Windows dev-* environment

["Alberto Ruiz" <aruiz gnome org>]

2008/10/6 Vlad Grecescu <b100dian gmail com>:
> Hello Gtk developers/users,
>
> I was wondering if, now that gtk.org maintains a list of up-to-date Windows
> packages (binaries, dev-binaries and sources) it would be possible to make
> an installation kit out of them.

Everything is possible ;-)

> Something integrated with an mingw/msys installer, for the developers.

There's been some discussion regarding this already, thing is, most
Windows developers use Visual Studio, so the real goal if we want to
engage Windows developer base is to do VS builds and provide an SDK
installer for it with project templates and stuff...

Until someone works out a maintanable way of delivering VS binaries,
this approach has to wait.

However, an easier approach in the meantime would be to provide
NetBeans or Eclipse plugins based on their C/C++ support with
MinGW/MSys, I think this would be a really big thing if it's well
maintained. Both IDEs are getting quite popular in quite some college
environments since the teachers don't need to teach yet another IDE
everytime they switch from one language to another (C/C++/Java/PHP),
we can reach a whole lot of people with something like that.

If I were you, I would mark that as my goal ;-)

> The problem is that there should be some kind of textual descriptions of the
> latest versions/latest URLs for both the binaries and the sources, on-line.

The easiest way that I can think of in the moment is to parse an ls of
the ftp directory where the stuff is. If you're interested on this, I
think that you should do a prototype installer first, no need to wait
for gnome sysadmins to setup something like that.

There is a zip bundle at the moment for Gtk+[0], it includes all the
dependencies, so maintaining an installer based on it it's not a big
deal since you don't have to track the version of the dependencies.

> So the name of the package, the version, the URLs for binary/dev/sources.
> (have a look at http://www.mingw.org/mingw.ini for the inspiration)
>
> This would allow an installer to: automatically install runtime or
> developement files, *and automatically upgrade everything*. It would also
> allow 64-bit compiling in the future:D
>
> Well, what do you think?
> I can start myself an nsis project with this if we agree.

Please, go ahead!

Make sure you hang around the #win32 irc channel at irc.gnome.org,
there is where all the win32 rock stars are.

[0] ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/binaries/win32/gtk+/2.14/gtk+-bundle_2.14.3-20081006_win32.zip

-- 
Cheers,
Alberto Ruiz