[xiphos-devel] windows build

[Karl Kleinpaste]

I went looking into the Windows build today.

The situation is very ugly. Problem is that many needed, old packages
are no longer supported, no longer available at all. And in #963, Dom
tells us that functional gtk3 for Windows can't be expected any time
soon, so we won't be able to use the modern versions of these old packages.

So I went looking for other solutions. Most straightforward in
appearance was to go to an archive of Fedora 30 packages to find the
last mingw-webkit*.rpm before they went obsolete in F31. I've now got a
copy of every mingw RPM from F30 including updates, and I could install
any of them I need, except for one little detail: Some of them depend on
similarly old packages, but those other old packages are still
supported, meaning that more recent versions exist and are necessarily
installed for other reasons.

Example: We need mingw64-webkitgtk. It depends on a particular release
of ICU. But ICU is still supported, so there exists a modern
mingw64-icu-whatever package. I can't install the old ICU RPM that's
compatible with mingw64-webkitgtk RPM alongside the modern ICU.

What I am currently contemplating, if I can keep my stomach from
revolting, is gathering all the needed ancient mingw packages, and
putting them together in a special drop-in environment by extracting the
packages with rpm2cpio. Just create a monolithic blob for our own use.
That is, the content will be present, but not known to the system as a
whole in an RPMish way. Update the cmake system to use a peculiar
PKG_CONFIG_PATH for Windows that includes this blob.

Comedy is not pretty.

I'm wide open to countersuggestions for how to resurrect the Windows build.
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