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

[Steve Lhomme]

Benjamin Otte wrote:

> The basic problem where there is no agreement is about what build
> environment to use.

There could (should) be more than one.

> 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.
> 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).

Yes. As long as Win32 support is just an addition it can be ensured 
before each release is done. The rest of the time (in CVS) it's not 
guaranted to work.

But it's possible to have all generated on a Windows machine. But that's 
one build environment. My goal is to have it working with nothing but 
Visual Studio 2003.

> 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?

I think most Windows developper will find it way easier to have no more 
requirements than the usual compiler.

> 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.

Yeah, that's a question of habit and point of view. You are used to your 
way of working and we are used to ours (we have many stuff that is 
cross-platform and doesn't require this kind of hacks). That's why I 
want to put all the Win32 stuff in the win32 dir while the rest of you 
will not care about it.

We can also have (and apparently David has it already) another build 
system for Win32 that uses MinGW/msys and works the way you want. But 
unfortunately nobody in Windows uses that to develop ;) It's still worth 
to have it in CVS too.