windows trial: yet more updates

Christian Stimming stimming at tuhh.de
Wed Mar 8 07:56:06 EST 2006


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Chris,

Chris Shoemaker schrieb:
> On Tue, Mar 07, 2006 at 06:05:16PM +0100, Christian Stimming wrote:
>> News from the windows front: I have been able to compile and link the
>> shared libraries in src/engine, which implies all its requirements were
>> built successfully as well.
> 
>   Nice work!  I would guess that src/engine is one of the hardest
> parts.  

Actually, no, src/engine is still the easy part compared to the overall
gnucash project, as there is still no GUI code in there. It is OTOH
already the sufficient condition to making a command-line version of
gnucash available on windows.

> Do I understand correctly that this results in something like
> gncmod-engine.dll?  

libgncmod-engine-0.dll, yes. The recent libtool will add the prefix
"lib" just as on Unix, and it will add a suffix with the SO_MAJOR number
(the "-0") similar to the shared library filename suffixes on Unix.

>   Are you far enough into this to estimate how hard this will be to
> complete?

Well, I will point out some more functions that are unavailable on
windows but where a common replacement exists (e.g. index(3) ->
strchr(3)). Once those missing functions are sorted out, compiling of
gnucash should be almost finished. However, linking and running gnucash
depends on the libgnome/libgnomeui libraries including orbit and bonobo,
and although precompiled windows binaries are available on
ftp://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/platform/2.12/2.12.2/win32/ I have no idea
whether they will actually work or just crash all the time.

The hard part will be to track down all sorts of different runtime bugs
in the interplay of these unfinished library ports and gnucash. I won't
do that -- I will stop once I can get gnucash to compile, because my
windows runtime debugging experience is too limited to expect success in
reasonable time.

So my estimation: It will be possible to compile gnucash on
windows/mingw32 in a few days. But in order to successfully open the
application window, open and save a file, and editing something inside
the register window, some windows gurus would probably need to spend 2-3
weeks of libgnomeui and libgtk debugging. After that, our gnucash code
repository could probably fully support a windows port as well.

Christian
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