Re: Outdated win32 bundle

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Hi;

On 12 June 2015 at 12:27, anatoly techtonik <techtonik gmail com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 4:15 PM, Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> wrote:
> > 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 out of date, and lack many of the bug fixes that went into GTK.
>
> I see two problems here:
> - [ ] http://www.gtk.org/download/win32.php - doesn't say this info
> - [ ] http://www.gtk.org/download/win32.php - doesn't have a link to
>       the site source to fix that

Yes, that's why I said:

| The current stance of everyone involved in the Windows backend for
| GLib and GTK+ is to stop advertising binary builds for Windows

There's also a bug about this:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=747742

It would be good to fix the website to reflect the reality.

> Points that are also missing to enable me (or anybody else) to
> fix the situation:
> 1. Is it possible to make "lack many of the bug fixes that went into GTK"
>     a link to actual list?

The "actual list" is published with each release of GTK+.

> 2. How to detect automatically that builds listed on the page are out
>     of date?

There are no new builds. The last build for Windows was for GTK+ 3.6,
which, as of today, is two and half years old.

The website needs to be changed to reflect the reality of the project,
not the past.

> > 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.
>
> Editing the site with heads up on the situation and an entrypoint
> to change it would make it better.

Indeed it would.

> > 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.
>
> You're speaking about Chocolatey or about Steam? =)

I'm talking about MSYS2.

> > MSYS2 is for developers, not for end users.
>
> Ok. Still I don't get it. I wanted a local directory install for GTK libs for
> compiling Wesnoth. I don't want system global install of MSYS2 - I
> already have MinGW unpacked locally and building with SCons. Is that
> possible?

That's possible if you build GTK+ for yourself.

There have been no binary builds of GTK+ since January 2013, but there
have been five new development cycles, so if you want to use an up to
date version of GTK+, your current choices for building your
application on Windows are either to build GTK yourself, alongside its
dependencies, or use MSYS2 and its packages.

> > 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.
>
> What about developers? I find it much better workflow when DLLs are
> local to the project being built rather then installed globally, because
> often you need to test several lib versions for testing different bugs and
> branches.

That's what I said above.

> > > Can GTK be cross-compiled for Windows?
> >
> > Yes, it can, and it routinely is.
>
> Is there a single command to run to do this?

There isn't. On Fedora you can use the mingw(32|64) toolchain packages
to build your own packages.

> > > > 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.
>
> But it should be compiled using MinGW, not Visual Studio, right?
> Because appveyor is the only known CI service (to me) that compiles
> the stuff with VS.

Visual Studio is another beast entirely.

The GNOME Foundation kindly provided us with a VM that we can use to
do Windows builds — which is what Tarnyko was using — using
cross-compilation.

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
https://www.bassi.io
[ ] ebassi [ gmail com]