Re: [E-devel] EFL cross compilation for Windows

[Adrien N. <ad...@no...>]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2016, Stefan Schmidt wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> On 21/10/16 16:44, Andrii Kroitor wrote:
> > Yes, this allows to compile working binaries for Windows from Linux system.
> > At least after this patch will be merged:
> > https://phab.enlightenment.org/D4357
> >
> > I have not tried to build python efl yet, but I can check it next week.
> >
> > It is possible to prepare precompiled packages, but I'm not familiar
> > with package maintenance and distribution.
> > So I have a few question about this:
> > What should be included into package?
> > - binaries (for sure)
> > - includes and other installed files?
> > - some meta info about package?
> > - all dependencies or only their list?
> 
> 
> I honestly have no clue at all how windows packaging is done. What I 
> would expect as a user or developer is thought that all binaries, 
> dll/libs and header files are installed so I can start developing with it.

You're a developer. Not an end-user. It's not completely trivial to have
the same "packaging" for both classes of people. ;-) 

> > Where can they be hosted? Win-builds are inactive for a long time, so I
> > doubt that we can reach their maintainer.
> 
> Vincent said he is in contact with him. Maybe reach out to him if the 
> are plans for a new release?

I'm actually subscribed to this mailing-list, I'm on #e.fr and
sometimes on #edevelop. I got quite a bit behind in my emails a few
months ago and it took me some time to catch up with them.

> > Should these packages be updated and uploaded manually?
> 
> If the path with win builds does not work out we could host the windows 
> binaries next to our source tarballs. Only for releases thought.

Writing and improving the package manager's GUI took time off the
packaging itself and has delayed the current release a lot.

But that actually doesn't matter much. It's supposed to be possible to
base on win-builds and build other versions or other packages and I
don't see why that couldn't apply to the EFLs.

However I'm not sure I understand some of things done in that git
repository. I've only taken a cursory look at it and can't comment much
but I've been more than surprised to see a pthread.h file copied there
and that it came from pthreads-win32 which, I think(*), is
ABI-incompatible while winpthreasd doesn't have that issue (everyone and
their mothers assume pthread_t is an int like on linux).

(*) maybe I've fixed the only occurrence of it a couple years ago, or
maybe not, I don't know anymore, but somehow I doubt it

That said, the priorities in win-builds now are to provide a better
integration with fetching sources from git, iron out the bugs and
current limitations, and release.

> > It would be perfect if someone has working build server able to build
> > EFL on Linux so we could add Windows build to it.
> 
> Before anyone screams Jenkins here. I will only consider new things it 
> handles when its current problems are sorted and we have a longer period 
> of stable usage.
> 
> We had cross builds for efl with mingw for some time but the cross build 
> slave started crashing and after this dragged out for over a year I 
> disabled the mingw builds.

Can you detail the setup a bit more? I don't know which cross-toolchain
and dependencies it used. Somehow I seem to remember they came from
gentoo but I'm not sure.

-- 
Adrien Nader