Re: Cannot build static libraries under mingw

[Alexander Shaduri <ashaduri gmail com>]

On Mon, 10 Nov 2008 17:52:22 +0100
Armin Burgmeier <armin arbur net> wrote:

> On Sun, 2008-11-09 at 21:16 +0400, Alexander Shaduri wrote:
> > Hello,
> > 
> > I'm having trouble building static glibmm with mingw
> > cross-compiler (linux build, windows target).
> > No problems with shared DLLs so far.
> > 
> > The configure line is
> > ./configure --disable-shared --enable-static --target=i386-mingw32msvc \
> > --host=i386-mingw32msvc --build=i686-linux --prefix=/opt/cross-tools

> I don't think building gtkmm or glibmm as a static library is supported,
> and I don't know anybody who had success with this. Is there a specific
> reason why you can't simply use shared libraries?

Well, I was hoping that the size of my statically linked exe would
be less than total size of all gtkmm dlls + my exe. Makes distribution
easier under windows. And I can't use the shared gtkmm installer,
because I'm using mingw's gcc 4.3, which is binary-incompatible
with gcc 3.4 (which the dlls in gtkmm installer seem to be built with).
Shared gtk installer doesn't have this problem (no C incompatibility
there).

Are you sure it's not supported as in "won't work, no matter how
you try"? Because, if I understand it correctly, it's a purely windows-specific
problem, solvable by adjusting the build system and macros to
not define some of the windows dll magic. Unfortunately, I lack the
skills needed to produce a patch (gtkmm's autotools stuff seems to be
beyond my grasp).

Thanks,
Alexander