[vlc-devel] Win32 Build methods support

[Mark Moriarty]

That may shut down the ability of people in a corporate environment to do
any work with VLC. It can be astoundingly difficult to get approvals for use
of software, especially FOSS, so requiring multiple sets of FOSS to get to a
build environment is kind of brutal.

So, no, fundamentally I would disagree with such an approach.  Nobody is
forced to do anything, of course, just don't purposely muck it up.  The
contribs were building, successfully, consistently, for a fair length of
time, and VLC itself has built successfully on Windows for years.   

-----Original Message-----
From: vlc-devel-bounces at videolan.org [mailto:vlc-devel-bounces at videolan.org]
On Behalf Of Rafaël Carré
Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2007 1:36 PM
To: Mailing list for VLC media player developers
Subject: [vlc-devel] Win32 Build methods support

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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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