[Libvir] Cross-compiling to Windows

[Daniel Veillard]

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 11:24:10PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> 
> I was reading this rather timely blog posting about the Trouble With
> Windows:
> 
> http://www.mega-nerd.com/erikd/Blog/CodeHacking/MinGWCross/cross_compiling.html
> 
> He mentions that he's managed to set up an entire cross-compiler
> environment to do the compiles (actually, it's a package in Debian
> called mingw32 -- we don't have it in Fedora), and he's set up Wine so
> he can run tests too.
> 
> Good idea for libvirt too?

  Well, depends what they are after. My experience with libxml2 and libxslt
is that there is a number of Windows, a number of compilers on/for Windows
and that usually compatibility is maintained only by compiling all elements
of the stack with the same compiler and the same flags (xml at gmome.org list
has a long history of horror stories like crashes because libxml2 had a 
different /Mx compilation flag than other element of the application stack).
  If you want to distribute a binary like virsh that may be fine. For the
library reuse it's a whole different story, you will need libxml2 compiled
- probably with the same compiler - and other elements too. Libxml2 default
Win32 binary is buit with Microsoft compiler (well one of them) using the
most standard options, still people frequently need to recompile it.
  I guess the best is to ship as part of the distro the information about
how to rebuild the library with various compilers as the information is
avaible. Building binaries which would work on Win32 would be nice but
probably limited to virsh in practice, I would expect people linking with
libvirt on Windows to try to rebuild the application, but I may be wrong.
  Anything which can be added to help building on Windows is IMHO worth
keeping and adding to the documentation,

Daniel

-- 
Red Hat Virtualization group http://redhat.com/virtualization/
Daniel Veillard      | virtualization library  http://libvirt.org/
veillard at redhat.com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine  http://rpmfind.net/