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<font face="FreeSerif">I went looking into the Windows build today.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Comedy is not pretty.<br>
<br>
I'm wide open to countersuggestions for how to resurrect the
Windows build.<br>
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