On Mon, 17 May 2010, DRC wrote:
Windows developers would still be able to edit and browse the source with Visual Studio, even if they need to build with MinGW.Per my previous message, there are a lot of additional components required, not just MinGW. We'd have to distribute the necessary MSYS components as well.
MSYS is a part of the MinGW project; not a big problem.
In total, this would amount to hundreds of megabytes of software, which someone from our group would have to maintain.
We are not talking about taking over maintainership from the MinGW folks; just provide the necessary fixes to make the build easier. This can be in the form of documentation and/or updated packages. Likely, we could perhaps also get help from the MinGW folks with some problems.
Size-wise, I don't think that a couple of hundreds of megs is much nowadays. As a side note, the Nokia N900 / "Maemo SDK Virtual Image" download is 1.6 GiB...
Adam is 100% right that maintaining the VC++ build scripts is tons easier.
But it's not just about maintaining build scripts: We need to maintain *code* compatibility with two compilers. Bug reports would need to include which of the two build systems were used. Some crashes might only happen with one compiler, so developers might be forced to have both build systems available to be able to replicate problems.
The suggested approach was tried in the TightVNC project. It was a big pain to work with: Every time I needed to build a Windows binary, I had to play the fix-the-broken-windows-build game. And the MS development tools doesn't play nice with cross platforms development: For example, at least earlier, you couldn't build if the source was located on a networked file server, you had to have all sources on a local disk such as C: ... (!)
The other issue with MinGW is that it simply takes too long to build with it on a real Windows system. I personally cannot be productive as a TigerVNC developer if I have to wait for the build to grind for 20 minutes every time I change something significant. I mean, just re-running the configure script takes a good 5 minutes of that. It isn't workable.
My experience of Visual Studio is the same. Every now and then, you have to "Rebuild Everything", and it takes forever.
Rgds, ---
Peter Åstrand ThinLinc Chief Developer Cendio AB http://www.cendio.com Wallenbergs gata 4 583 30 Linköping Phone: +46-13-21 46 00
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