Re: gtk on win32

[jcupitt gmail com]

On 30 March 2010 08:26, John Emmas <johne53 tiscali co uk> wrote:
> Another consideration is which compiler you're intending to use.

My preferred solution is to cross-compile from linux. I develop and
debug on linux, which I find much more comfortable than Windows, then
when it's all working, press a button and get a windows installer.

This has a few advantages over building on Windows:

   Easier maintenance

I can use all the usual unix tools to keep the GTK stack (cairo,
freetype, pango, fontconfig and friends) and my application
dependancies (openexr, libtiff, fftw etc.) up to date. On Windows,
I've found building and maintaining these things time-consuming. On a
linux host it's pretty much automatic.

  Single build system

I can use autotools to automate the build process on every platform. I
don't need to maintain a separate set of Windows project files.

  More automation

I find linux much easier to automate than Windows. For example, I have
a simple script which runs at 2am every day to checkout SVN trunk,
build a Windows installer, and upload it to the project website. If
there are any problems it sends me a mail with all the configure and
buid logs. I expect something like this is possible on Windows, but I
wouldn't know how to do it.

I wrote some notes on the process if you're curious:

http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/index.php?title=Build_on_windows

And here's a typical installer built this way:

http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/supported/7.20/win32/nip2-7.20.7-2-setup.exe

It's not using the win32 theme, so it looks a little odd.

John