Who's cross-compiling gnucash for Windows ?

[Christian Stimming]

> On Sep 5, 2013, at 2:07 PM, Geert Janssens <janssens-geert at telenet.be> wrote:
>> mingw-get is not compatible with a cross-compilation environment
>> however. So I was wondering how many people are actually building
>> gnucash for Windows via a cross-compiler ?
>>
>> My current impression is that the cross-compilation set up has slowly
>> been gathering dust. I may be wrong though. Hence the query...

I've been running a gnucash cross-compile on my Linux box from time to  
time, but not for reaching an actual distribution package. The point  
is (or: was) that running the gnucash build cross-compile on a Linux  
host is significantly faster than running it natively with mingw on a  
windows host. In numbers: Running "install.sh" cross-compile with a  
Linux host (ubuntu, mingw32 tools from apt-get) takes approx. 2-3  
minutes with building everything (!) from scratch, including  
libgoffice, aqbanking, and whatever. On Windows this takes several  
hours.

But I didn't use the result for anything else except verifying that  
there a no mingw compiler errors.

> Great! It would be nice to get it working with more recent versions of MinGW.
>
> Cross-compilation implies that it's on a system with working Python,  
> so one could
> use jhbuild... in which case, why use the rather clunky shell scripts?

Are you volunteering to write jhbuild configuration files for a whole  
build of gnucash? This sounds like a lot of work to me. If you're up  
to it, don't hesitate to do it, though :-)

> BTW, while trying to build on Win7 the last couple of days I noticed  
> that the versions
> of the various packages are scattered about along with their  
> download URLs. I think
> it would be nicer if they were in their own block near the top of  
> defaults.sh.

No, I don't think this would be an improvement for all cases. In the  
majority of URLs, some part of the version number appears as well.  
Examples:

> set_default GCONF_URL   
> "$GNOME_WIN32_URL/GConf/2.22/GConf_${GCONF_VERSION}-3_win32.zip"
> set_default GTK_URL     
> "$GNOME_WIN32_URL/gtk+/2.24/gtk+_${GTK_VERSION}-1_win32.zip"
> set_default LIBGSF_URL  
> "$GNOME_MIRROR/sources/libgsf/1.14/libgsf-${LIBGSF_VERSION}.tar.bz2"
> set_default LIBSOUP_URL  
> "$GNOME_WIN32_URL/libsoup/2.26/libsoup-${LIBSOUP_VERSION}-1_win32.zip"

For all those cases, the URL and the VERSION variable need to be kept  
together, otherwise you'll end up changing only the VERSION without  
paying attention to the URL that might need changes as well. Hence,  
I'd rather prefer to have the VERSION variables right next to the URL,  
as it is now.

Regards,

Christian