R: Building LibreOffice on Windows

[walter]

Speaking with Italo Vignoli (The Document Foundation) I understood that the goal was to use only open source tools so you do not have to depend in any way by the owners tools, such as Microsoft.

Best regards
walter



-----Messaggio originale-----
Da: libreoffice-bounces+w.guerrieri=ranocchilab.com at lists.freedesktop.org [mailto:libreoffice-bounces+w.guerrieri=ranocchilab.com at lists.freedesktop.org] Per conto di Tor Lillqvist
Inviato: lunedì 20 febbraio 2012 12:37
A: w.guerrieri at ranocchilab.com
Cc: Bjoern Michaelsen; libreoffice at lists.freedesktop.org
Oggetto: Re: Building LibreOffice on Windows

> 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
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