MinGW-w64 Builds

Windows builds of popular libraries using the MinGW-w64 compiler.

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Introduction

MinGW-w64 Builds uses:

• The MinGW-w64 compiler suite
• MinGW-w64's MSYS build
• Mingw-builds (available here)

Why not Cygwin?

Cygwin builds libraries that depend on the Cygwin DLL. While the Cygwin project is awesome, that's a dependency I'd rather avoid.

Why not MSYS2?

MSYS2 is a (poorly-named) fork of Cygwin with the same drawback.

Why not TDM-GCC?

I've encountered bugs; whether they're due to my setup I can't say, but I can say I don't encounter them using MinGW-w64.

Why not Win-builds?

Win-builds is awesome, but they don't have a Python package, and the package manager doesn't run on Windows XP, which makes me worry about the rest of the libraries.

Why not cross-compile?

This is actually my second attempt to build popular libraries for Windows use. The original idea - which worked very well - was to cross-compile the libraries for Windows on Linux. Unfortunately, GObject Introspection is too difficult to build this way. It builds a Python module in C that it then uses to generate typelib files; this process requires a cross-compiled Python, but this Python will not run in the native environment, so the typelib files cannot be generated. Essentially, and as far as I know, it is impossible to cross-compile GObject Introspection as a result.

Design

The original design had multiple phases; everything would be cleaned, source would be downloaded and unpacked, everything would be built, packages with circular dependencies would be rebuilt, then the final archive would be built.

While this saved a lot of code, it was painful for development because there wasn't an easy way to build an individual package. The current design has self-contained scripts, so if updates or fixes are needed, it's easy to update the build script and rebuild.

Dependencies and the 2nd build phase are a different issue. I'd like to transition to a makepkg-compatible setup, which comes with a whole host of benefits: source verification, dependency checking, etc. The 2nd build phase will probably continue to build on that, just as it builds on the current build system, but we'll see what happens once we get there.

Usage

Download and install MinGW-w64 (I've only used and tested the 32-bit version because I want the best compatibility). Do the same for MinGW-w64's MSYS build and Mingw-builds. I installed MinGW-w64 at C:\mingw-w64 and MSYS at C:\msys. Mingw-builds installs inside of the MinGW-w64 folder (unless you change it, but why...).

Open a terminal and run bash. I installed http://code.google.com/p/mintty and created a shortcut where it calls bash for this, but you can use cmd or [http://sourceforge.net/projects/console](Console 2), whatever suits you.

Edit config.sh and set MINGW64_DIR to the location at which you installed MinGW-w64. Then run build.sh. After a while, it will finish building all the libraries (located in the build subfolder, unless you changed it in config.sh). It will then build the mingw-builds.tar.xz archive, as a matter of convenience.