Proposed SIG: Windows MinGW cross-compiler SIG

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Tue, 2008-07-08 at 15:46 +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> 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).
>From my experience, using a unified spec is non-viable.

All it does is to add avoidable package deps and unnecessarily
complicates things, because a MinGW-binutils is widely independent from
Linux (and Fedora).

Furthermore, binutils is comparatively small, easy to package and easy
to maintain - GCC is a completely different matter.

> 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.
I would not do this - MinGW is a different OS, suffers from different
issues and has a different upstream (RH-branch vs. FSF-trunk vs. MinGW
hacked GCC).

>   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?
Same as above. I would not want to merge any MinGW package's specs with
Linux/Fedoras. They share a common upstream somewhere, but MinGW's
upstream isn't necessarily identical to Fedora.

>   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.
Only if you merge them. IMO, this is not useful for cross-toolchains,
because you actually will want to use their sources, not Fedoras.

For my own cross-toolchains, I even go one step further - I repackage a
cross-toolchain's library-binaries, and only build the cross-tools,
because only a target's binaries are guaranteed to be compatible with
the "native upstream".

Ralf