Provisioning a mingw native compile environment

[Sam Thursfield <ssssam gmail com>]

Hi everyone,

I guess it's about time to christen this mailing list.

I'm looking at the best way of collating and providing a native mingw
compile environment. I'm thinking up to and including jhbuild
(everything beneath the Gnome platform, to put it another way). Since
the situation with mingw.org, mingw-w64, msys etc. has got pretty
confusing at the moment I think it's worth bundling all this together
for people who want to do their own Windows builds.

Has anyone done any work on this already? I'm thinking of writing a
simple shell script to download and integrate an appropriate
MSYS/mingw-w64 compile environment and install the various tools
jhbuild bootstrap might be expected to do (but I don't believe
extending jhbuild bootstrap is the correct way to do the job in this
case). In theory I'd like to integrate it with mingw-get and creating
packages for things that aren't in the mingw.org repositories, but I
have no desire to try and package mingw-w64 gcc that way so for now it
will just output a big tarball.

My goals is for apps and libraries to be able to provide a jhbuild
moduleset and say "run jhbuild in this compile environment and you
will get a build".

A separate goal which I'm not going to attempt now (I know Dieter has
plans here too :) is to provide mingw-get packages for things *inside*
the platform - I'm hoping that one day we will be able to say
"download this compile environment, mingw-get install the Gnome
platform libraries that you need, and build your app for Windows".

Sam