Status update about mingw-w64 support

[Erik van Pienbroek]

Hi everybody,

It's been a while since the last announcement about mingw-w64 support so
I think it's about time for another update.

Packaging guidelines:
---------------------

Some weeks ago I proposed a new set of packaging guidelines for
mingw-w64 support. These have been under review for a few weeks and have
been approved by the Fedora Packaging Committee at the meeting of April
13 [1]. These guidelines will be effective as of Fedora 16 [2].

One of the changes which wasn't in the initial draft, but was proposed
by the FPC is that all mingw macros shouldn't contain an underscore any
more. For example, the macro %{_mingw32_bindir} is now called
%{mingw32_bindir}.

Another change is that all mingw packages have to use the macros %
mingw_configure, %mingw_make, %mingw_make_install and %mingw_cmake to
build/install the package. In the original draft these macros were
surrounded by curly braces. Upon request of the FPC, these curly braces
were dropped. A test has been done to be sure this doesn't break
anything.

Backwards compatibility macros also have been introduced so packages
using the original mingw packaging guidelines can still work (though
package maintainers are recommended to make their packages compliant
with the new guidelines once the 5 toolchain packages have been imported
in Fedora)


Package reviews:
----------------

As the approved packaging guidelines differ a bit from the original
draft, the 5 base toolchain packages needed to be updated. This has
already been done by now and updated packages have been put up for
review [3]. Unfortunately, nobody has started reviewing the packages
yet, so without that we can't continue. In order to perform a review you
only have to be a package maintainer in Fedora, so various people in the
MinGW SIG should already be able to perform these reviews (you don't
need to have any other magic powers to perform reviews, so please help!)


Legal approval:
---------------

Back in Januari, when I put up the mingw-w64 packages up for review I
already made them block 'FE-Legal'. Unfortunately, I haven't heard
anything ever since from FE-Legal about the packages.

Recently, one of the lead developers of the mingw-w64 project, Kai Tietz
has been hired by Red Hat to help maintaining Windows cross compiler
support. Right now he's trying to get everything rolling in Red Hat
Legal internally to get legal clearance for mingw-w64 so we can continue
with the introduction of mingw-w64 in Fedora. At the moment we don't
have an indication about an estimated time for such an approval, but I'm
confident that it will be cleared before the Fedora 16 feature freeze.


Testing repository:
-------------------

Because of the new packaging guidelines, all packages in the testing
repository have also been adjusted to be compliant with these new
guidelines. At the moment only the mingw32 and mingw64 packages are
compliant with these new guidelines. The darwinx packages aren't really
updated for now, but some changes have been made so that the darwinx
packages can be installed independent of the mingw32 and mingw64
packages.

In this new round of updated packages the mingw-w64 toolchain is now
also based on the trunk branch. Support for the secure API (as was
requested for wine-gecko support) is also enabled.


Kind regards,

Erik van Pienbroek


[1]:
http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2011-04-13/fpc.2011-04-13-15.59.html
[2]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:MinGW
[3]:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/showdependencytree.cgi?id=673784&hide_resolved=1