Building LibreOffice on Windows

[Tor Lillqvist]

> But .. isn't  there a project that involves the complete replacement of the
> MS compiler?

Yes. But that is not used *on* Windows. The subject of this thread is
"Building LibreOffice *on* Windows".

MinGW (the commonly used name for the GNU compiler and tool-chain when
targeting Windows) is supported only for cross-compiling LibreOffice.
The main reason to use MinGW is to be able to cross-compile.
(Cross-compile from Linux or some other Unix, that is.)

We don't see any point in using MinGW to build LibreOffice on Windows
itself. If one wants to build on Windows itself, why not then use
Microsoft's compiler, and be able to use the much more usable VS
debugger?

So far not all of the code is even compilable using MinGW due to gaps
in the APIs supported by the MinGW tool-chain.

OpenOffice.org, at least back when Sun/Oracle still was behind it, had
a few (?) people working on using MinGW on Windows. We are not
interested in that. Correspondingly they had not worked on
cross-compilation (to any platform) at all as far as I know.

When I say "we" above, I mean "those of us who have worked on this
stuff so far in LibreOffice". Of course, you are free to think
differently and work on using MinGW on Windows, if you for some reason
think it would be a good idea. As long as your patches don't make
stuff incredibly ugly and complex, they will be accepted. But you get
to maintain that aspect yourself, of course.

--tml