Building Gpredict 2.x for Windows

[csete]

I am starting this new thread to track status and progress of windows builds, since the original pull request is now merged and closed.

Status as of writing:

1. @phlash has updated the build files as well as some source files and can build a binary using mingw64 on Debian 9. He uses Gtk+/Glib binaries from Gnome project and these appear to be from 2012/2013. There is a test binary package on Phil's webiste for testing, but this has stability issues, which can be related to the age of the libraries. We need newer libraries.
2. @gvanem has been building gpredict on windows using his own Makefile. This seems to support both MSYS2/MinGW and MSVC.
3. I have installed MSYS2/MinGW64 on windows following the guidelines on the Gtk+ website. The default instructions set up a 64 bit development environment and I have managed to build a 64 bit binary package that runs stable and looks like the default Gnome 3 theme (see my comment below).

[csete]

I used the instruction on the Gtk+ website to setup MSYS2/MinGW. This has setup a more or less complete Unix environment and I could use the autotools method with a slightly modified configure.ac to build a binary.

The installation should also work using the updated Makefile as well as be able to build 32 bit binaries. I am going to try this next.

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[csete]

I continued with MSYS2/MinGW on windows and could install the 32 bit SDK along side the 64 bit SDK. I then copied the SDKs over to my Debian machine and could cross compile gpredict using the mingw-w64 cross compiler package.

So, using a standard MSYS2/MinGW installation we can build both 32 and 64 bit binaries on both windows and linux and using the latest Gtk+/Glib libraries.

I will now look into updating the runtime paths, icons, etc.

[csete]

Latest build, now using the new application icon (files no long available):

• gpredict-win32-2.1.152.zip
• gpredict-win64-2.1.152.zip

[phlash]

Looks like MSYS2 is the way to go for up to date libraries, glad that sorted out the stability issue :)

Removing the experimental binary...

I spent a little while looking at how MSYS2 obtains it's libraries, with a view to avoiding the Windows installation + copy to Linux for a cross-build. It uses the Arch package manager pacman, with all the appropriate packages pulled from repo.msys2.org. This looks like it could work on an alien system such as Debian, sadly there is no port of pacman outside Arch or MSYS2 available for Debian-based distros. I will continue with building pacman from source to complete the experiment however.

[phlash]

Experiment complete, it is possible to build pacman from source on Debian and use it to pull the appropriate MSYS2 i686/x86_64 dependencies for gpredict into local folders. I needed to re-compile the glib schemas (I suspect a native MSYS2 runs a post-fetch script for this):

cd /mingw32/share/glib-2.0/schemas/
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/glib-2.0/glib-compile-schemas .

I also note that this approach appears to include a number of unnecessary libraries (eg: libpython2.7.so) that bloats the deployable ZIP by ~10M.

[csete]

I think I have now fixed all remaining issues with the windows binary. As far as I can tell everything is working now.

gpredict-win32-2.1.156.zip

I think this is sufficient for the 2.2 release and we can improve the readme and the makefile as we go.

[srcejon]

I've just tried building git master for windows on msys2 using both mingw32 and mingw64 (x86_64) toolchains.

In order to get it to build & run on both, I needed to make a few changed to the Makefiles which are attached.

Main changes are:

• including the png and jpeg loaders (jpeg seems to be needed for png to work - not sure why)
• including the icons/Adwaita/scalable directory in the distribution
• it no longer seems necessary to manually adjust pkg-config paths
• update compiler flags to support both 32-bit and 64-bit builds

win32_build_patch.txt