Re: [Mingw-users] Building Linux to Windows cross-compiler from source

[Paulo R. D. <pr...@uo...>]

On Thursday 14 October 2004 20:10, Garthy wrote:
> Henrik,
>
> Thankyou for your reply and suggestions.
>
> Yes, I've thought of setting up a native build system. It is one
> of my fallback options. The disadvantages are as follows:
>
> - My main development environment is Linux, I'm using the
>    autotools, ruby, and all sorts of other tools to generate
>    much of the source. I would either need to pregenerate and
>    transfer the source each build or get all the tools I am
>    using working under Windows (quite a lot of work). I'd also
>    have to set up and maintain a build environment on two
>    different machines rather than one.
>
> - I have two machines to choose from. Either I can use my main
>    dev machine, in which case I need to reboot each time I
>    want to do a Windows build, and lose the use of my development
>    environment; or use the secondary machine, which is somewhat
>    slower (.8GHz vs 1.9GHz Athlon). The build time is pretty
>    long as-is.
>
> It does have the advantage that the environment is probably
> better supported as there are certainly more people using
> native mingw than as a cross-compiler.
>
> I think using an emulator could make compilation extremely slow,
> and the setup would be a lot of work. It is a good backup
> suggestion though, and would let me keep the development to
> one machine if needed. It would also be advantageous for
> partial builds.
>
> Thanks again. :)
>
> Garth
>

Hey Garth, I'm in the "same boat" as you. And I agree with the reasoning you 
mentioned above.

Actually, I do have Windows in another partition, but prefer working under 
Linux. And yes, I am using Mingw/cross-compiler here (a Linux environment) 
for Windows development (also); Here I made an specific user account for 
cross-Linux-to-Windows development, the .profile and .bashrc change all the 
PATHs and relevant(?haven't found many yet?) stuff when logged in as such 
user.

For testing, usually I take 2 steps: (1) run the final executables under wine, 
and (2) save it at the windows partition (fat) and, later, run it from there. 
If you have a spare Windows license, you can also intall an emulator (qemu, 
for example, may work) and make the testing from there, but the reports I've 
been seeing from people who did it usually point out a performance penalty 
(many times, too hard).

Well, so far, this system has been working reasonable enough. There are some 
constraints, however (little problems with sound, for example). I think it 
depends a lot with what you need to do. For some especific stuff, I can't 
avoid going in Windows mode (in one project, for example, I *have* to use a 
Windows specific compiler - its MS command line compiler; but that's it).

Regarding your buildings problems, have you thought about getting pre-builts? 
In any case, you probably have already seen this links (someone probably has 
already point this out to you, but, here it goes anyway): 
http://www.libsdl.org/extras/win32/cross/ and 
http://www.nanotech.wisc.edu/~khan/software/gnu-win32/mingw-cross-howto.txt ?

Regards!

Paulo