On Thu, Jan 8, 2009 at 9:07 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <martin@v.loewis.de> wrote:
i'd just ... much rather be completely independent of proprietary software when it comes to building free software.
I guess my question is then: why do you want to use Windows in the first place?
ha ha :) the same question was asked when i started the nt domains reverse-engineering for samba, in 1996. the answer is: i don't. but there are a lot of users and developers who feel that they don't have a choice. or haven't been given one. so if it's possible for me, as one of the "under 1% of computer users i.e. linux" to compile stuff that will work on the "over 95% of computers used by everyone else i.e. windows" _and_ i get to stick to free software principles, that's gotta be good. take pywebkit-gtk as an example. the first-level (and some of the second-level) dependencies for pywebkit-gtk are roughly as follows: * libstdc++ * cairo, pango, gdk, fontconfig, gtk * libxml2 (which is dodgy) * libxslt1 (which is so dodgy and dependent on incompatible versions of libxml2 it can't be compiled on win32) * libicu38 * libcurl * libssl * webkit * python2.5 * python-gobect * python-gtk that's a *big* xxxxing list that comes in at a whopping 40mb of _binaries_. webkit itself comes in at 10mb alone. libicu38 fails _miserably_ to cross-compile with mingw32. i was damn lucky to have beaten it into submission: it took two days and i couldn't run any of the tests, but actually managed to get at least some .libs, .dlls and .a's out of the mess. libxslt1 and libxml2 have compile errors in mutually incompatible versions on win32, plus, unfortunately, the versions that _do_ compile correctly (really old versions like libxslt-1.12 + libxml2-18 or something) are not the ones that can be used on webkit! i had to get the source code for gcc (4.4) because when linking webkit against the MSVC-compiled libicu38 gcc actually segfaulted (!). and that was tracked down to exception handling across process / thread boundaries in libstdc++-6 which had only literally been fixed/patched a few days before i started the monster-compile-process. i tried hunting down python-gobject and python-gtk for win32, but there is a dependency needed before you get to that: python25.lib. as i mentioned previously i tried hunting down a .lib for python25 but of course that would be useless unless i also have a libtool-compiled .a so there wasn't any point. so, all the hard work that i did cross-compiling up webkit for win32 was completely wasted because python itself could not be compiled on linux for a win32 platform. hence my interest in making sure that it can be. _then_ i can go back and revisit the monster compile process and finally come up with the goods, on win32, on the gobject-based DOM-model manipulation stuff i've added to pywebkit-gtk. i've got linux covered, i've got macosx covered. win32 is the last one. l.