Building on windows10 with Msys2/MinGW?

[zbang]

Before I go too far down this rabbit-hole, the main question is "does or could it work?" If not currently, what sort of work would be required? The Cmake rules would have to be hacked about, but how much else?  (The docs mention a cross-compile for windoze from linux using mingw.)

 

I'd be willing to take this on if it's considered useful and is less painful than installing/using msvc when I have a perfectly good msys2/mingw-x64 setup.

 

z!

 

[Krzmbrzl]

To be honest, I can't really estimate how painful it will get. I assume if you get the vcpkg dependencies installed and compiled correctly, then the rest should be relatively smooth. But that's just a guess...

 

On 4/26/2023 at 1:43 AM, zbang said:

less painful than installing/using msvc when I have a perfectly good msys2/mingw-x64 setup.

Well, if you are on Windows already then setting um MSVC is usually quite easy. Though of course working with MSVC is a PITA...

[zbang]

Thanks, maybe I'll give it a try (and keep notes). The desire to never touch msvc again is quite high.

[zbang]

Working on this..... adding all of the packages is quite easy once you have the prefix desired (I'm working with mingw-w64-clang-x86_64 at the moment).

 

This leads to a couple of questions-

There are a pot-load of patches for 3rd party software.  Are these required, which implies always building from source? OTOH, do the MXE packages have those patches? I wouldn't expect it, but I've been wrong before. (MXE appears to be mingw based; I don't know enough about it.)

 

The build instructions for windows cross-compile seem to suggest that install the MXE/etc packages, get the source, and fire off qmake; this seems to ignore  all of the releng scripts. This could be an artifact of how the wiki windows build is structured. What's correct?

 

Since msys2/mingw endeavors to have a consistent environment on both *nix and windoze, would it be appropriate for me to work from the centos build scripts as much as possible?

 

(Is this the proper forum for asking this sort of question?)

 

z!
 

[Krzmbrzl]

On 5/1/2023 at 4:58 AM, zbang said:

There are a pot-load of patches for 3rd party software.  Are these required, which implies always building from source?

No, I think the patches in vcpkg are only to get stuff to compile in different setups. I am not aware that we would depend on any particular patch to be applied in our dependencies.

 

On 5/1/2023 at 4:58 AM, zbang said:

The build instructions for windows cross-compile seem to suggest that install the MXE/etc packages, get the source, and fire off qmake; this seems to ignore  all of the releng scripts. This could be an artifact of how the wiki windows build is structured. What's correct?

MXE instructions no longer apply as MXE no longer contains all necessary libraries (at least the Poco libraries are missing. I tried getting them to work with MXE, but didn't receive any help from the maintainers so eventually just gave up on it).

 

On 5/1/2023 at 4:58 AM, zbang said:

Since msys2/mingw endeavors to have a consistent environment on both *nix and windoze, would it be appropriate for me to work from the centos build scripts as much as possible?

I have barely any experience with cross compiling, so I'm not sure. In the end the correct answer will be "whatever gets you a working cross-compiled binary", though I realize that is kinda unhelpful 😄

 

 

[Krzmbrzl]

On 5/1/2023 at 4:58 AM, zbang said:

(Is this the proper forum for asking this sort of question?)

I guess it's as good as any other place. Though if you want faster responses, consider joining our development Matrix channel: https://matrix.to/#/#mumble-dev:matrix.org