[gst-devel] Re: Native Win32 build of GStreamer 0.8.1

[Thomas Vander Stichele]

>
> > Well, to play devil's advocate, if the patch doesn't receive further
> > communication either way (ie, with no unresolved "problems" on our
> > side), *and* it doesn't mess up the unix-side of things, I'll commit it
> > :)
> >
> The basic problem where there is no agreement is about what build
> environment to use.
> GStreamer requires a lot of files to be created during the built which
> requires quite some tools being setup right. These tools include
> among others autoconf (for gstconfig.h), bison, flex (the parser) and perl
> (glib-mkenums). A typical Windows developer setup for Visual Studio has
> none of those.

Yes, that's what I understood from the discussion.

> So the easy approach is to generate those files on a Linux box and include
> them verbatim in the Windows build. This requires however that those files
> get regenerated properly whenever something changes (which is the reason
> why they are autogenerated in the first place).

I wouldn't mind to be doing this labor at release time, if this is what
we chose to do.  Or even automate it so it gets done daily and the
results commited to a separate dir in cvs.  But are we sure that the
files generated on Linux work correctly on Windows ?

> The question is now: Should we require Windows developers to get a
> complete build stack going with these tools or should we put workarounds
> in our cvs to ease Windows developing?
> 
> Both David and me think we should make Windows developers create a
> complete build stack while the Windows devs don't want that.
> Which I can understand, because it's freakin hard to get that working in
> Windows.


Well, I agree with the theoretical ideal of having Windows devs have a
complete stack of tools needed to build from cvs just like we have on
unix.  To get to that point however, I think it's ok to have a phase
where we help them out by building these generated files regularly
however so some of them can get started on developing with gstreamer
while the issue of building gstreamer gets resolved over the next
months.

Does that sound reasonable ?

Thomas


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