GnuCash on Windows -- about to become true!

[Christian Stimming]

Some pictures say it all:
http://www.tu-harburg.de/~et2cs/gnc/gnc-screenshot5.png
http://www.tu-harburg.de/~et2cs/gnc/gnc-screenshot7.png

After the combined effort of Andi, Derek, and myself, I was able to get as far 
as starting the main window with the current gnucash SVN code. So it *is* 
really possible. The install.sh script in packaging/win32/ already does 
almost everything we know. BUT there are still a lot of things that don't 
work. In the above screenshots all the following did *not* work at runtime:

 * The "File -> Open" command gave the error message "Can't parse the URL 
<filename>", http://www.tu-harburg.de/~et2cs/gnc/gnc-screenshot6.png, in 
other words I couldn't open a file

 * The "New account" dialog opened (although with the Gtk-Warning 
"GnomeDateEdit widget unavailable"), but gnucash crashed on "Ok", probably 
because of that missing widget

 * Somehow the pre-compiled glade package is missing all of the Gnome widgets, 
you can see the respective warning here 
http://www.tu-harburg.de/~et2cs/gnc/gnc-screenshot4.png and of course that 
needs to be fixed before you can expect gnucash to work correctly.

Before I got this far, I needed to tweak more things that aren't yet included 
in the installer:

 * In g-wrap I changed the code generator that loads dynamic modules as 
described in the second paragraph here 
http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Windows#g-wrap

 * I compiled GnuCash with --disable-error-on-warning 

 * I excluded the business/ subdirectory completely from the build in order to 
simplify the whole work

 * The startup script "gnucash" doesn't generate the correct paths 
automatically, so I basically fixed the script manually. Also, for whatever 
reason gnucash didn't correctly lt_dlopen() its modules at the installation 
location, *but* it would correctly lt_dlopen() them at the build location, so 
for the above screenshots I deliberately included all the build directories 
to the GNC_MODULE_PATH, which worked, which in turn is surprising enough.

Ok. But it has been shown that gnucash *does* compile, install, and run. Now 
go tell this all of the windows hackers around there, and they should be able 
to complete this work in no time. Way to go!

Christian