Building LibreOffice on Windows

[Tor Lillqvist]

> 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.

Bah. I don't agree with that.

After all, we are talking about building software to run on a
Microsoft's proprietary Windows OS. What difference does it then make
if the tools used to build are open source or not?

The main problem in building LibreOffice for Windows on Windows
currently is that the *open source* stuff used in the build, i.e.
Cygwin, is slow and causes random errors. The Microsoft compiler and
linker work fine. If there was a way to use *only* Microsoft's own
tools, cross-compiling for Windows from some Unix would be much less
attractive.

The ideal would be if Microsoft provided its tool-chain as
cross-compilers running on Linux.

Of course, it might also be that some people would see it as a good
thing if the only compiler supported would be gcc. Sure, that would
reduce the unpleasant tediousness of writing portable code.

But whatever, I just work here.

--tml