Buildows

Buildows is a JHBuild based tool aimed toward enabling compilation/cross-compilation and packaging of open source libraries to be distributed for the Microsoft Windows platform

Dependencies

Buildows is a self contained JHBuild, so JHBuild installation is needed to use Buildows, however the following tools/packages are necessary:

Bazaar
MinGW
Python 2.4 or 2.5

Get It

To use Buildows you will 1st need to create an empty folder before checking out buildows from the Bzr branch, because currently Buildows polutes the parent folder (ouch!):

    $ mkdir windows-build
    $ cd windows-build
    $ bzr branch lp:buildows

Usage

    $ cd buildows
    $ ./buildows

The default configuration includes building GLib.

Useful resources

GTK+/Win32, a wiki page about the various Windows resources

Editing the configuration

:FIXME: link to the JHBuild rc files

:FIXME: link to the JHBuild module sets

:FIXME: explain the wixets

:FIXME: explain the folders created in the parent folders

Some background information about WiX

<asabil> WiX is an MSI linker/compiler/assembler/disassembler/....
<asabil> you have a set of command line tools that take xml files and produce an msi/msm
<asabil> the 1st one is the compiler
<asabil> the compiler takes a .wxs file
<asabil> and produce a .wixobj
<asabil> when you got all the .wixobj
<asabil> you can link them together to produce either an .msi or .msm
<asabil> the compiler is : candle.exe
<asabil> the linker is : light.exe
<tml> but to do this it presuably uses the MSI-related DLLs ? it doesn't reimplement the functionality?
<asabil> yep
<tml> arc: so if one wants to run WiX on Linux, one needs to copy said DLLs so that wine finds them. does the license of the DLLs allow this?
<tml> s/wine/Mono
<arc> tml, no, they're implemented on wine
<tml> so one could compile them into normal libraries, and run WiX under Mono normally, not involving wine at all?
<arc> tml, if someone ports the msi from wine to linux... yeah
<arc> tml, http://source.winehq.org/source/dlls/msi/