Well I'm not sure it is valid to call it "faulty" since you've obviously

managed to build something with it, but it doesn't sound as if you at all use the build system GIMP is meant to be build with, namely autotools (Automake, Autoconf etc).

I did the following :-

Windows XP development system, running MSDev as my main development environment.

Full cygwin development tree install.

1. configure 2. make

3. Configure & compile errors ... 4. Figure out missing dependencies, environment variables that needed setting, etc ..
5. Repeat as necessary, with necessary modification of gimp.h at one point to parse the
command line.

I had to spend around a day and a half messing about to do something that should have
taken around half an hour.

It should not be particularly difficult to enhance your build system to build natively on
Windows. I suggest looking at the Mozilla build system for an example of how to do this
properly.

Its always a pain getting up & running with a new development tree, but things could be
more straightforward.

One example. This pkgconfig thingy. In every module, I needed to edit each .pc file so
that :

prefix=[local path to module]

... now, what's this all about ? You can figure out this path implicitly from the location of the .pc file !

Yuk.

/awaits severe flaming

GIMP itself is an excellent cross plaform app. The build system however looks like it
needs a little work.

Best regards,

Steve.

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steve@advance-software.com wrote:

Well I'm not sure it is valid to call it "faulty" since you've obviously

It should not be particularly difficult to enhance your build system to build natively on
Windows. I suggest looking at the Mozilla build system for an example of how to do this
properly.

The core developers all develop on Linux where building GIMP is vastly easier, so if you want it to be easier to build GIMP on Windows you would have to contribute patches yourself. I think GLib and/or GTK+ has MSDev build files in a build-subdir.

One example. This pkgconfig thingy. In every module, I needed to edit each .pc file so
that :

prefix=[local path to module]

... now, what's this all about ?

Um, what? Not sure why edited the .pc files, but I'm pretty sure you didn't have to.

Have you ever built anything on Linux? If not, maybe you should before you building Linux software on Windows, which is 100 times more difficult ;)

- Martin

Hi,

On Sat, 2008-10-25 at 07:41 -0400, steve@advance-software.com wrote:

It should not be particularly difficult to enhance your build system to build natively on Windows.

If you think this would be easy, then feel free to do that.

It would be a lot easier though if you just learned some of the basics about our build system. You would then realize that it also works nicely on Windows. You just need to know what you are doing. Feel free to ask.

Sven

Hi Sven,

It would be a lot easier though if you just learned some of the basics

about our build system. You would then realize that it also works nicely on Windows. You just need to know what you are doing. Feel free to ask.

I looked on your website, ran a few searches and could not find an explanation of how to
build a plugin on Windows using the MSDev compiler/linker , so used cygwin gcc as a
temporary solution.

Please could you point me at a webpage explaining how I can compile this plugin on
Windows, using the MSDev compiler/linker.

Cheers, Steve.

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Full cygwin development tree install.

Please avoid Cygwin if you are building native Windows software. Cygwin is nice if you build Cygwin software, but presumably that is not what you are wanting to do, if you want to build plug-ins that work with the "native" Windows GIMP.

(Yes, I do know that there are some software packages where the way to build for Windows (no Cygwin used at run-time) uses Cygwin. I know of OpenOffice.org and Mono. But for packages that use "normal" GNU autofoo and libtool, like GIMP, Cygwin should usually be avoided if what one wants is to build non-Cygwin "native" Windows code. It's way too easy to confuse things and mix Cygwin libraries with non-Cygwin ones.)

Use the mingw toolchain instead, and MSYS to run configure scripts and as interactive shell. Or use the cross-compiling mingw on Linux.

I had to spend around a day and a half messing about to do something that should have taken around half an hour.

"should have taken" in an ideal world.

It should not be particularly difficult to enhance your build system to build natively on
Windows. I suggest looking at the Mozilla build system for an example of how to do this properly.

Are you volunteering?

One example. This pkgconfig thingy. In every module, I needed to edit each .pc file so that :

prefix=[local path to module]

If you use the native Windows pkg-config, you don't need to edit .pc files (at least not for the libraries whose Windows development packages are distributed on ftp.gnome.org).

... now, what's this all about ?

You can figure out this path implicitly from the location of the .pc file !

Yes, and that is what pkg-config does on Windows (*not* Cygwin, which from software point of view is just a variant of Unix, even if actually running on top of Windows). Read the manual page. The prefix entry in the .pc file is not used on Windows.

IMHO pkg-config could well have been designed/defined to work this way on Unix, also, but I don't think it can be changed at this stage, in case there really are some packages out there where the location of the .pc file is not $prefix/{lib,share}/pkconfig.

The prefix line is present in the .pc files o (at least "my") Windows packages just because it would require more work to edit out the prefix line from .pc files when building a library for Windows. In the Windows packages I build, the prefix used at build-time on my machines on purpose contain a string of hex digits (an md5 hash value actually) as a hint that it is more or less a dummy string that is not expected to exist on the user machine.

GIMP itself is an excellent cross plaform app. The build system however looks like it needs a little work.

Sure. Again, are you volunteering?

--tml

On Saturday, October 25, 2008, 23:44:13, Tor Lillqvist wrote:

IMHO pkg-config could well have been designed/defined to work this way on Unix, also, but I don't think it can be changed at this stage, in case there really are some packages out there where the location of the .pc file is not $prefix/{lib,share}/pkconfig.

I'd like to see this happen very much, as it would spare me from needing to fix the .pc files before I build Gimp :)

BTW, I uploaded the development package (headers and import libraries) to sourceforge, it's available on the Files page:

Hopefully, nothing is missing.