[vlc-devel] Win32 Build methods support

[Rafaël Carré]

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Hello,

Currently, we 'support' 4 different ways to build VLC for Windows:

* Microsoft Visual C++
This explicitely not advised, and I never heard a successfull story.
Let's just say it's not supported, the Visual C++ warriors who wanna try
anyway will still be able to do it, but not bother us.

* MSYS
* cygwin
I don't really know the difference between both, and frankly I don't care.
What I know is that is several people asking for help on the forums and
on the mailing lists when they use these methods.

The common point between the 3 previous methods, is that they run on
windows, which is not particularly suited to VLC which use a UNIX build
environment, even when using UNIX/POSIX emulation.

* Cross compilation from Linux
We all know that one works, because it's used every night to build the
Nightlies (nightlies.videolan.org)

It uses well-tested native UNIX tools, autoconf, automake, aclocal etc;
and the mingw32 compiler (used also in cygwin/mingw32).

When using this last method, we know that a failure in building VLC can
be reproduced by the developers, unless of course if the bug is in
windows specific code, or in the compiler itself.
But that would also be the case when using msys/cygwin.

The major point can be that Windows users don't have Linux installed,
nor want to install it, nor are able to do it.


But these days they can use free software to emulate a Linux
installation, such as qemu which happens to be very effective on x86
with the Fabrice Bellard's accelerator.

I'm in the process of write an howto build VLC on Windows, using debian
etch as a guest in qemu, to ease this procedure for newcomers to Linux.


So we reach the question if wrote for:


Do you agree marking Microsoft Visual C++, msys, and cygwin as OBSOLETE
and NOT SUPPORTED AT ALL by the VideoLAN Team, in the wiki and in the
INSTALL.win32 ?


That way we won't spend energy on maintaining/fixing cygwin/msys
platforms, and we also will save the time of people using them.

- --
Rafaël Carré
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