Re: Outdated win32 bundle

["Jasper St. Pierre" <jstpierre mecheye net>]

Would it be possible for me to fund / help maintain official GNOME
Win32 bundles and an SDK? I'd love to improve Windows support of GTK+,
but I'm never sure where the status is. Last time I tried jhbuild it
failed on something early on -- I believe fontconfig, so that was a
bummer.

On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 9:15 AM, Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> wrote:
> Hi;
>
> On 11 June 2015 at 13:44, anatoly techtonik <techtonik gmail com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 9:22 PM, Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> wrote:
> > > The current stance of everyone involved in the Windows backend for
> > > GLib and GTK+ is to stop advertising binary builds for Windows — as we
> > > don't do that for any other platform, and nobody sticks around long
> > > enough to keep doing that or to set up a continuous integration build
> > > for GTK.
> >
> > Stop advertising == stop supporting?
>
> If I wanted to say "stop supporting", I would have said that. Not that
> we *ever* "supported" binary builds, on any platform. If you want
> commercial support, you should contract somebody.
>
> Currently, we advertise ad hoc Windows builds on gtk.org; those are
> out of date, and lack many of the bug fixes that went into GTK. This
> situation is confusing for application developers, and makes the
> project look bad. It also reflect badly on the great work that
> developers have been doing in order to make GTK work well on Windows.
>
> On top of that, we don't offer binary builds for any other platform,
> and instead rely on distributors — like Homebrew on Mac; the *BSD
> ports; or the various Linux distributions — to provide binary builds
> for them. Windows is an anomaly, mostly because there weren't
> good/usable software distributions in the past. This has now changed,
> and it's a good thing to ensure that developers on Windows get
> reliable, up to date software.
>
> > > Developers using the G* core platform libraries on Windows are
> > > strongly encouraged to use the MSYS2 distribution:
> > >
> > >   https://msys2.github.io/
> >
> > Like Git? Ship 200Mb of "additional value" on top? Just for comparison
> > Mercurial installation is 37Mb compared with 267Mb of Git. And that for
> > every GTK application?
>
> MSYS2 is for developers, not for end users.
>
> You're supposed to set up the development enviroment on *your*
> development machine(s); once you have built your application, you can
> take your binary artefacts, including the DLLs you depend on, put them
> into an installer, and let your users download the installer — which
> is exactly what you should have done in the past, even with pre-built
> DLLs. The intended change is for application developers to get
> pre-built, up to date binaries using MSYS2, instead of downloading zip
> files from gtk.org that we cannot reliably keep up to date.
>
> Telling your users to download your application; download DLLs from
> gtk.org; shove them into some directory; and, finally, hope for the
> best, was never a good software distribution mechanism.
>
> > > This will provide you with pre-built packages that are known to work
> > > and maintained. It also allows you to build your own packages on top
> > > of it, and create an installer from the result.
> >
> > Can GTK be cross-compiled for Windows?
>
> Yes, it can, and it routinely is.
>
> > > What the GTK team would love, on the other hand, is somebody putting
> > > the effort in setting up and maintaining a continuous integration
> > > service — similar to https://build.gnome.org — for Windows builds.
> > > This way we would be able to catch build regressions after every
> > > commit, without relying on the application developers to file bugs.
> >
> > http://www.appveyor.com/ if using closed source service is okay.
>
> No, it's really not — especially if it has to run on the gnome.org
> infrastructure.
>
> Ciao,
>  Emmanuele.
>
> --
> https://www.bassi.io
> [ ] ebassi [ gmail com]
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-- 
  Jasper