[xiphos-devel] windows build

[Samuel Banya]

Hi there,

My name's Sam Banya.

I'm a hobbyist developer at night since I do tech support during the day for legal software. My GitHub page is:
https://github.com/sbanya/

My personal site is: http://www.musimatic.net/

I've worked with Python 3, and JS (HTML5+CSS3), but still would want to contribute to this project.

I primarily work in Linux, and my machines at the moment run Debian stable minimal install.

Please let me know if there are any lower level issues on the GitHub page I can take a look at, as well as what would be suitable for a beginner like myself.

I'm willing to learn a bit of C, C++, and GTK if needed, so let me know.

Also, I need to make a tab specific Emacs config to handle the tab spacing requirements since I read just briefly on your coding style page that you prefer the methods of the Linux kernel developers for tab styling as well so I'll try working on that as well for myself.

Hope everyone is doing well.

Thanks,

Sam
________________________________
From: Karl Kleinpaste <karl at kleinpaste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, April 22, 2020 11:00 PM
To: Xiphos developers <xiphos-devel at crosswire.org>
Subject: [xiphos-devel] windows build

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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