From: LM <lm...@ya...> - 2012-10-22 23:18:40
|
Jared Maddox wrote: > In my experience the main problem is not building software, main > problem is managing packages. My experience has been the reverse. I've used spkg for package management in the past and I'm currently working on writing something from scratch for that kind of thing. As to problems building software, let me give some examples. If someone has references to how-tos, I'd be very interested. By the way, MXE does a great job of documenting the steps to build software for MinGW, but since it's a cross-compiler, the steps don't always translate well to a Windows environment. The FAQ at mingw.org has had a question up for ages about the lack of a man program in the MinGW/msys environment. Anyone know the steps to get one building successfully on Windows? I recently found some source code for an embedded system that includes a man program written in C and with some porting works great on Windows. I just spent about a month back and forth with the cmake list/developers because I couldn't get cmake to build in bootstrap mode within msys. I think I have all the issues where it failed finally worked out. Am currently looking at building a more current version of Python. There are a bunch of patches for building with MinGW at the site, but they've never been integrated into the source and from comments, it doesn't look like they'll ever be. I also just managed to build apcstudio, a fltk based music application. I don't think that program has been successfully compiled on any operating system since around 2002 because of changes to the gnu compiler. If you're using the latest version of libpng, a lot of applications (including ones like tuxpaint), no longer compile properly because a couple of lines in the API changed. The Beyond Linux From Scratch site has information on a useful patch to libpng to add animation (used by Mozilla based browsers). Beyond Linux from Scratch does a wonderful job of documenting how to build libraries and applications on Linux. MXE is also a wonderful resource. I guess what I'm looking for is a forum or place to document some of these tips and things to look out for when building Open Source. By the way, if an applications doesn't work on Windows and I like it, I'll typically take the time to port it. So, as I mentioned, it's not usually that straight forward for me to just build an application, especially if it wasn't designed for Windows. Porting may not be part of the build process, but some programs simply can't be automated to build on Windows without it. So, if anyone's interested in that sort of thing or knows a good place to discuss these types of topics further, I'd be very interested to hear from you. Thanks. Sincerely, Laura |