Re: windows installers

[Ben Pfaff]

It turns out to be a lot easier on Fedora, which I switched to a while back
because of hardware compatibility problems with Debian.  On Fedora,
you just do "dnf install mingw64-..." because they've already packaged
a ton of cross-compiled versions of software. I only had to specially
build spread-sheet-widget.

I configured OK and installed with:
make -j128 install install-html install-pdf DESTDIR=$PWD/inst

but
make -j128 Windows/installers DESTDIR=$PWD/inst
is just an exercise in frustration because
    cp `$(CC) -print-file-name=libwinpthread-1.dll` $@
just prints libwinpthread-1.dll even though I do have that dll in
/usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32/sys-root/mingw/bin/libwinpthread-1.dll
and because
    cp $(environment_dir)/bin/*.dll $@
is busted because it expands to
cp $(echo -fstack-protector -lssp | /usr/bin/sed -e 's/^-L//' -e
's|/lib$||')/bin/*.dll Windows/nsis-bin
which obviously isn't helpful.

I played with this for a while but I didn't come up with anything
satisfying.

It's very frustrating that there are so many Windows users but no
Windows developers. I would rather spend my time on features, not
on supporting proprietary operating systems.



On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 1:19 PM Ben Pfaff <blp@cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> That makes sense. I'll try it out when I can.
>
> On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 12:56 PM John Darrington
> <john@darrington.wattle.id.au> wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, May 10, 2021 at 11:13:49AM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> >      John, may I have the latest copy of your build script? I'll see how
> >      hard it is for me to get it working.
> >
> > It's checked into git under the name Windows/build-dependencies
> >
> > Under debian, you'll need to install meson from backports.
> >
> > J'
> >