Re: Reconsideration of MinGW work

[Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com>]

Hi Peter (& Neil & co),

On Mon 22 Mar 2010 09:10, Peter Brett <peter@peter-b.co.uk> writes:

> Neil Jerram <neil@ossau.uklinux.net> writes:
>
>> I've been making gradual progress on MinGW cross building, but I've
>> reached a point where I'm no longer sure that this is worthwhile.  This
>> email explains why, and invites comments from anyone interested in this
>> - especially from anyone who is really trying to use Guile on Windows.
>
> We get people coming to the gEDA user mailing list on a regular basis
> saying, "Where can I find a version of gEDA for Windows?" and the
> Windows builds we've put out have been generally well-received.  Since
> Guile is one of our core dependencies, lack of Windows support in Guile
> would mean that we wouldn't be able to provide a Windows build at all
> (we already had massive problems at the start of the Guile 1.8.x series
> with GMP portability, or lack thereof, and this meant that it took
> almost three years after 1.8 became the supported stable release for us
> to be able to stop supporting 1.6).

As Neil mentioned, hopefully we can get there via the gnulib path; it
does seem to be the right thing to do GNU-wise in this case. Guile's
code would stay the same, as much as possible, and Gnulib would have
mingw support in it, so that if you compile Guile on mingw, the Gnulib
compat layer gets compiled in.

Sounds acceptable, no? Granted it might take a little while to get it
right, but hopefully not three years.

Andy
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