[GNC-dev] Building on Windows

[John Ralls]

> On Aug 26, 2019, at 1:49 AM, Geert Janssens <geert.gnucash at kobaltwit.be> wrote:
> 
> Op zaterdag 24 augustus 2019 19:40:06 CEST schreef Matthew Forbis:
>> I was running gnucash directly from the inst directory and not creating an
>> installer first.  This explanation makes sense.
>> 
> 
> There you go.
> 
> It would be nice though to be able to run directly from the inst directory 
> while debugging as it saves time not having to recreate a bundle for each 
> iteration.
> 
> Frankly I believe this shows how little actual development really happens on 
> Windows. Because of that the development experience is not really optimized on 
> that platform. With you actively doing so, it may be helpful to share your 
> experiences so we may make it more attractive for other Windows oriented 
> contributors.

Has anyone tried Windows Subsystem for Linux (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10)? That might be a less painful development environment for Windows users at least in the short term.

Longer term I think we need to figure out how to make GnuCash buildable in Visual Studio. Recent releases provide for a Clang toolchain as well as the standard MSVC++ one. We might be able to create a build environment combined with vcpkg (https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg) that would be more stable, offer a lower barrier to entry, and generate windows-understandable debug info.

Regards,
John Ralls