Compiling a debug version of GStreamer 1.5.2 on Windows

[Josh Doe]

On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 12:07 PM, Harry <mckameh at wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> Sebastian,
>
> To my way of thinking, it doesn't make any sense to use mingw for creating
> Windows DLLs.
> We Windows developers normally use Visual Studio, so without distributing a
> Visual Studio debug version, getting good bug reports on Windows is rather
> hopeless for you.

I'm very grateful the GStreamer developers produce Windows binaries at
all, it's something that until relatively recently was done by others.
Regularly updated Windows binaries are quite valuable in my opinion.
Integrating Visual Studio into the build system is not trivial,
otherwise it would have already been done. Using mingw is very similar
to the other platforms, which makes automating the build system far
easier. You are welcome to improve the build system to support Visual
Studio, I and many other developers would be grateful. The fact that
debugging cannot be done easily in Visual Studio, while unfortunate,
is not a showstopper by any means. The debugging output is quite
verbose and can helpful in most cases. If you have issues with
specific plugins you can always compile them in Visual Studio,
something I have done on occasion.

> I don't mind fixing a reasonable number of Visual Studio compile errors and
> contributing to the project, but the problems I'm encountering are more
> serious than that.
>
> - Do you mean to say that the Visual Studio projects found in
> "...\gstreamer-1.5.2\win32" are useless?
> - If they are not, could the person who created them publish some sort of
> user guide?

Those project files are woefully out of date, and are more or less
useless. There has been a plan for some time to automatically generate
project files, but I don't think it has had any attention yet.