Compiling a debug version of GStreamer 1.5.2 on Windows

[Nicolas Dufresne]

Le mardi 11 août 2015 à 18:07 +0200, Harry a écrit :
> 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.

We are well aware of the issue. Though, you need to understand there is
a community clash. In the Open Source community, it is expect that
solution are proposed, discussed and implemented by people having
interest in it. Most, if not all people from the Windows community,
which unfortunately is often around Close Source, have the habit of
requesting feature and often forget that they could be the one
implementing it (they are the one with the interest).

To one of your remark:
    "It would be much simpler if the maintainer of the Windows port of
    GStreamer could publish detailed instructions on how to compile it
    from sources", it's important to understand that there is no such
    thing as a "Windows port"
There is no such thing as a Windows port, and not specific maintainer
for that. GStreamer is supports Windows, that's it. It's the same
people the develop OSX, iOS, Android, Linux and so.

> 
> 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?

These are left over from 0.10. We use to have projects that would let
you build GStreamer using Visual Studio. Sadly, maintaining two build
systems was too much work and many of the dependencies GStreamer rely
on don't have support for Visual Studio. Having only GStreamer built
with Visual Studio but none of the dependencies only moves the problem.
Solving this issue is overwhelming.

The root cause here being interroperability in the debugging symbols.
In theory, Microsoft could solve this issue by opening the debugging
format, which we could then add to mingw. This would likely take less
time, and not cause such a huge overhead on developers.

> - If they are not, could the person who created them publish some 
> sort of user guide?

It's not the work of a single person. They where created by hand, using
the Visual Studio UI. The user manual of this software is your guide.
Take note that these dates back to something like Virtual Studio 6.0
(maybe a tad newer). But they are so old, that you may just restart
from scratch.

Nicolas
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