Re: GTK+3 win32/64 build environment

[Simon McVittie <simon mcvittie collabora co uk>]

On 10/04/13 11:50, tarnyko tarnyko net wrote:
> Plus, my tests have proven that it matters while building. There are
> some fixes for libtool and the compiler itself in the buildenv (see the
> 64-bit one) ; if you use a different version, it will sometimes break
> the build.

If libtool as shipped by $DISTRO is broken, surely the solution to that
is to report bugs and get it fixed, preferably upstream, but failing
that, in your favourite distribution? Likewise for the (cross-)compiler.

> A solution would be to have a standalone MinGW install for Linux.

There are several MinGW installations, in several distributions; I'm
aware of at least Debian, OpenSUSE and Fedora having it. If the GNOME
project wants to cross-compile Windows binaries, the minimum requirement
is that building on *one* of those distributions works (OBS seems to be
a popular choice); people who want broader support than that are welcome
to improve their respective distributions' MinGW stacks, but that's some
way off the critical path :-)

While I'm sure it would be possible to put together a standalone MinGW
tree that expects to be installed in /opt/mingw (or whatever), lots of
distribution developers have already done the equivalent work for you.
Doing a mini-distribution for that seems somewhat redundant.

If users of one Linux distro need to do GNOME-for-Windows builds in a
chroot, virtual machine or container with a different distro, that
doesn't seem like the end of the world: best-practice in Debian/Ubuntu
is to do "production" package builds in a chroot anyway (via
pbuilder or sbuild).

Also, if something works on (say) OpenSUSE's stack but not Debian's,
then that's either a simple matter of "the compiler is in a different
place" (probably meaning that something is insufficiently automatic), or
a bug in Debian's stack (quite possibly of the form "please upgrade to
gcc x.y.z"). Neither seems insurmountable.

    S