[Mingw-users] Useful tool for installing MinGW, cross-compiling dependencies

[Josh H. <jos...@gm...>]

Hi,

I have been working for a while on a small tool for setting up cross-compilation
environments for myself. I do a bit of hobby work with SDL and mainly work
with Linux, but it is nice to give Windows binaries to friends, etc. Setting up
a MinGW compiler is easy enough, but for every lib that your game or app needs,
you need an appropriately compiled library too.

Thus "crossenv" was born.

Crossenv acts as a wrapper script around existing install processes.
It downloads the source of the library, executes the correct configure
command, applies any required patches and does the compile. It also does
dependency tracking, which allows for even further automation of the process.

./crossenv.sh i386-mingw32 libtiff

It really is that easy. libtiff relies on zlib and libjpeg, and of
course the compiler
itself, all of which would be installed automatically, the only fuss
being pressing
'y' on your keyboard at the start.

Crossenv consists of a number of scripts. The main script is crossenv.sh.
It should be provided with two arguments the name of the install platform, and
the package name. Packages are tar.bz2 files which live in the
packages directory.
These packages contain an install script, a dependency info file, and
any additional
files required for the install (such as patches). Packages exist for
the main compiler
(named 'core'), and for individual libraries.

The current list of packages are basically just to satisfy my own needs:
core, libconfuse, libfreetype, libjpeg, libogg, libpng, libsdl,
libsdl-net, libsdl-ttf,
libtiff, libvorbis, libzzip, zlib

Everything in crossenv is designed to work out of a user's home
directory; none of
the scripts require root permission. Of course, crossenv can be
installed anywhere
where the user has write access.

There are three main directories. 'environments' stores the finalised compile
environments. These are small mirrors of a regular unix file-system,
but with files
compiled in the target platform instead of in the host platform. 'packages' is a
directory storing all of the available packages. 'temp' is as you
would expect - a
temp directory.

There is currently only one platform available - 'i386-mingw32' - the
cross compiler
for Windows PE executables, which should run on W95 onwards, but may
require a NT
based kernel (NT4, Win2k, WinXP, etc). Additional platforms is planned
for the future,
once a decent number of mingw32 packages are available. The next
platform will probably
be something for MacOSX, their appears to be basically no docs on how
to cross-compile
for a Mac, so a decent script would probably be useful for many people.

I don't really have a website or anything fancy yet, but that will
come if this message
generates sufficient (read 'any') interest.

For more information, see the following:
http://thejosh.info/crossenv/

Cheers,
Josh