[GNC] Errors from jhbuild on Windows 11

[John Ralls]

> On Aug 8, 2026, at 03:06, Neil Aggarwal <neil at propfinancing.com> wrote:
> 
> Any ideas what went wrong?

Setup-mingw64.ps1 should have installed those for you. Jhbuild is a linux build system that I’ve coerced into working in a MSYS2 environment, but it can only build the modules that I configured in gnucash.modules. Any other dependencies have to come from MSYS2’s package manager, pacman. 

>  No matching system package installed:
>    boost
>    cmake
>    ninja

To install those you would run
   pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-boost mingw-w64-i686-cmake mingw-w64-i686-ninja

But if you didn’t actually read https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Building_on_Windows#Bootstrap_the_build_environment but just mindlessly pasted in the one verbatim command there then you didn’t bootstrap your system and you’ll need more than those three packages.

That said, the MSYS2 project is killing off the mingw32 archtiecture and a growing number of GnuCash’s dependencies aren’t available. It’s quite possible that a new gnucash-on-windows installation won’t work without a bit of work pulling in dropped packages from the repository archive (https://repo.msys2.org/mingw/mingw32/).

I have a replacement, https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash-on-windows/pull/68, but because the antique WebKitGtk we’ve been using doesn’t work on 64-bit Windows it will only work on the future branch (leading to GnuCash 6.0 to be released next Spring) and needs the WebKit replacement in https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/pull/2275.

In the meantime the best way for you to build GnuCash on Windows is to use WSL. Create a WSL VM for the Linux distro of your choice and follow the corresponding instructions referenced in https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Building_On_Linux.

Regards,
John Ralls