Proposed SIG: Windows MinGW cross-compiler SIG

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Tue, Jul 08, 2008 at 02:30:10PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 07, 2008 at 10:15:54PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> > I've got a self-building, mostly working set of Fedora packages for
> > the MinGW cross-compiler (no optional libraries yet).  You can get the
> > spec files and instructions by doing:
> > 
> >   hg clone http://hg.et.redhat.com/misc/fedora-mingw--devel
> 
> What primarily concerns me is that plan around keeping this in sync
> with patches/updates to the main gcc, binutils, libpng, libgcrypt,
> gnutls, etc RPMS already in Fedora.
> 
> The idea of maintaining 2 near identical specs & builds for all these
> packages isn't that nice, particularly since many of these are security
> sensitive packages

So there's a bit of confusion going around, partly my own.

Mingw-binutils (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=454408)
starts with a forked version of binutils maintained by mingw. They
have their own release schedule for this so I'm not sure how viable it
is to have a single binutils SPEC file generating both the normal
binutils and a 'binutils-mingw' subpackage.  (Ignoring for now whether
or not the Fedora binutils maintainer is even interested in this).

Mingw-gcc (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=454410) starts
from plain gcc 4.3.1 source, so combining these into Fedora's gcc
package might be more hopeful.  However there are some nasty
dependencies (mingw-runtime and mingw-w32api, neither of which can be
built ab initio because of circular dependencies) and I suspect that
any time there is any sort of mingw related trouble with this package,
the gcc-mingw subpackage will be the first to be dropped.  I don't
want this.

As for the remainder we get into asking question like -- should we
generate the mingw-gnutls library (as an example) from the main gnutls
SPEC file?  There are going to be dozens of such libraries and we'll
have to coordinate with a large number of existing Fedora contributors
to make this happen.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
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