cyg2deb – convert Cygwin packages to Debian packages

What is the purpose of this software?

This software is used to convert Cygwin packages to Debian packages.

Why is this useful?

Most Cygwin packages are only useful on Windows, but the Cygwin package list also includes lots of packages for cross compilation. Those packages can also be used on Debian GNU Linux to run cross compilations there.

The focus is on cross compilations with Mingw-w64 on Debian GNU Linux. Both Cygwin and Debian include Mingw-w64 cross compilers which allow building 32 bit and 64 bit Windows applications, but Debian only has a small number of libraries for that purpose. Ignore that libraries and use the libraries from Cygwin!

Where is it used?

It is used to build Windows installers for QEMU and Tesseract.

How to use it?

Here is a typical use case running under Debian (a UTF-8 environment is required):

$ python3 cyg2deb.py
Name:        mingw64-x86_64-a52dec
Version:     0.7.4-2
Category:    Devel
Requires:
Description: ATSC A/52 (AC-3) decoder library for Win64 toolchain
Install:     noarch/release/mingw64-x86_64-a52dec/mingw64-x86_64-a52dec-0.7.4-2.tar.xz (47832)

make package, mingw64-x86-64-a52dec_0.7.4-2-1_all.deb

mingw64-x86-64-a52dec_0.7.4-2-1_all.deb generated
Name:        mingw64-x86_64-aalib
Version:     1.4rc5-2
Category:    Devel
Requires:    bash mingw64-x86_64-ncurses
Description: ASCII art library for Win64 toolchain
Install:     noarch/release/mingw64-x86_64-aalib/mingw64-x86_64-aalib-1.4rc5-2.tar.xz (66348)

make package, mingw64-x86-64-aalib_1.4rc5-2-1_all.deb

mingw64-x86-64-aalib_1.4rc5-2-1_all.deb generated
Name:        mingw64-x86_64-adwaita-icon-theme
Version:     3.26.1-1
Category:    Devel
Requires:    mingw64-x86_64-hicolor-icon-theme mingw64-x86_64-pkg-config
Description: GNOME desktop icon theme for Win64 toolchain
Install:     noarch/release/mingw64-x86_64-adwaita-icon-theme/mingw64-x86_64-adwaita-icon-theme-3.26.1-1.tar.xz (13172464)

make package, mingw64-x86-64-adwaita-icon-theme_3.26.1-1-1_all.deb

mingw64-x86-64-adwaita-icon-theme_3.26.1-1-1_all.deb generated
[...]

That use case first gets the complete Cygwin package list setup.ini. Then it looks for all packages with names starting with mingw64-i686- or mingw64-x86_64-, downloads them, unpacks them and repacks them into Debian packages for 64 bit cross compilation. Deprecated packages are skipped automatically. Packages which are not useful for cross compilation because they only work on Windows are skipped, too.

To get only certain packages for cross compilation, just run python3 cyg2deb.py NAMEPATTERN. NAMEPATTERN is a regular expression for the package name. Example: python3 cyg2deb.py mingw64-i686-.* will get only the 32 bit packages, while python3 cyg2deb.py mingw64-x86_64-.* will get only the 64 bit packages.