Building on Windows from scratch - follow up

[Geert Janssens]

On Monday 28 April 2014 07:52:03 John Ralls wrote:
> On Apr 28, 2014, at 2:09 AM, Geert Janssens <janssens-
geert at telenet.be> wrote:
> > This weekend I have spent more time on getting the Windows build
> > running with more recent mingw compilers (gcc 4.8).
> > 
> > This is a continuation of the work I have started in December last
> > year.
> > 
> > Current status:
> > - I have forked packaging/win32 into a separate directory with the
> > clear goal of decoupling the maintenance of a build environment on
> > Windows from gnucash releases. This repository is currently
> > publicly accessible from my personal github account:
> > https://github.com/gjanssens/gnucash-on-windows
> > Ultimately it is my goal to bring this repository under the GnuCash
> > project umbrella but not everything is working yet (more on that
> > later). - The install and dist scripts have been updated so that a
> > working gnucash installer can be built in the new mingw
> > environment. Up until yesterday afternoon gnucash installed by the
> > installer worked as well. I haven't tested the build with the new
> > c++ changes yet.
> > 
> > What's still missing:
> > - the scripts for the build server need some tweaking in order to
> > build tags under the new configuration.
> > - improve documentation
> > - set up desktop icon for msys.
> > 
> > Future plans:
> > - fix the build server scripts
> > - reduce build overhead by smartening the install scripts
> > 
> > Wild, halfbaked ideas for the long term:
> > - switch to mingw64 [1] and win-builds [2]
> > - package the gnucash dependencies for win-builds and reduce setting
> > the gnucash environment to running the win-builds package manager
> > 
> > Lastly, how to use my repository ?
> > - Download the bootstrap_win_dev.vbs script. It has some
> > documentation at the beginning. Running it is mostly a
> > double-click. This will prepare a c:\gcdev directory with the
> > minimal tools required to run install.sh - Start msys
> > (c:\gcdev\mingw\msys\1.0\msys.bat)
> > - cd /c/gcdev/gnucash-on-windows.git
> > - install.sh
> > and if you want to create the windows installer as well:
> > - dist.sh
> > 
> > Please test and provide feedback.
> 
> Yay! I'll pull it and start a build soon.
> 
> Maybe we should make a new gnucash-packaging repo for this and
> gnucash-on-osx.

That's one way. I was rather thinking of keeping a gnucash-on-windows 
and a gnucash-on-osx repo. I chose the name for my repo to your osx 
example.

The reason I would keep two separate repos is that most users interested 
in building gnucash on windows themselves are not interested in building 
it on osx and vice versa. Also the current tools used for building on 
either platform are rather different so there isn't much overlap. That 
may change if we could manage to get jhbuild running on windows. I'm not 
going to try that yet though.

I was going to propose to bring the gnucash-on-osx repository under the 
GnuCash umbrella. It may attract some more attention there.

> 
> For wild, not even in the oven yet, for the very long term, how about
> "build GC native in MSVC"?
> 
:) Would require a copy of MSVC of course.

Geert