Cygwin / MinGW Port

[Christian Stimming]

Stuart D. Gathman schrieb:
>>Just curious. I was wondering if there has been an effort to port GnuCash to 
>>the Cygwin or MinGW environments.
> 
> A few years ago, I would have said, "Just run Quicken" for those with
> Windows.  However, Quicken 2003 (my last Quicken version - forced upgrade) has
> become such a bloated pig that it takes forever to do anything - and I
> have been on Gnucash since the beginning of the year.  So Gnucash would
> actually be a useful light weight alternative to the standard Windows
> offerings (what Quicken was once upon a time).

Kind of funny to read about gnucash as a "light weight alternative" -- 
usually gnucash is accused of being too heavy-weight (from users who are 
looking for a simple checkbook)...

But to the point: Yes, gnucash on mingw/cygwin would be nice to have, 
but it's really difficult. We depend on many libraries, some of which 
are already available on mingw (e.g. glib/gtk), some of which are not 
(most notably gnomeui). Either *all* of these libraries happen to be 
ported on windows -- then we will surely happily port gnucash as well. 
Or gnucash would need to be modified such that the dependency on 
non-ported libraries is dropped. Gnumeric, for example, chose the latter 
approach and got rid of its gnomeui dependency. This is why gnumeric is 
now available on windows. But for gnucash either of the two approaches 
need a *huge* amount of work -- at least 10-20 man-months.

This will not happen soon, as the current priority is the porting effort 
to gnome2, which will still require something along 5-10 man-months.

> I think more in the open source world need to realize that packaging
> is a valuable service for non-geeks and for those not familiar with
> the build environment.  It is not easy to create a trouble free
> invisible package for a product 

Absolutely. Someone who would offer a packaged version for easy install 
would very much be encouraged by the developers to offer this, and even 
for any reasonable price. However, the current developers all are busy 
with other day-jobs. Therefore none of the current developers seems to 
have the room for starting such an initiative. This is why we currently 
only can direct any such requests to the well-known distributors -- 
after all, this is what distributors charge their money for.

Christian Stimming