Re: Outdated win32 bundle

[anatoly techtonik <techtonik gmail com>]

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 out of date, and lack many of the bug fixes that went into GTK.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

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 How to detect automatically that builds listed on the page are out
    of date?

Also, the page needs explanation how those builds appear on
gtk.org For example:

[buildbot downloads source] --> [installs MinGW/MSYS]
--> [runs `make all` in source dir] --> [zip files in build dir]
--> [maintainer uploads zip to FTP] --> [updates HTML manually]

> 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.

> 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? =)

> 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?

> 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.

> > Can GTK be cross-compiled for Windows?
>
> Yes, it can, and it routinely is.

Is there a single command to run to do this?

> > > 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.
-- 
anatoly t.