Differences with mingw.org cross-toolchain

[Erik Leunissen]

L.S.

For several years, I've been using a linux hosted cross MinGW toolchain,
as described by:

 http://www.mingw.org/wiki/LinuxCrossMinGW

from where I also retrieved the sources and build script.

I only recently discovered the fedora-mingw project and would like to
know how the cross-toolchains from both projects differ. Are there any
reasons to favor one above the other?

Thanks in advance for your information,

Erik Leunissen.

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 11:50:18PM +0100, Erik Leunissen wrote:
>  L.S.
>  
>  For several years, I've been using a linux hosted cross MinGW toolchain,
>  as described by:
>  
>   http://www.mingw.org/wiki/LinuxCrossMinGW
>  
>  from where I also retrieved the sources and build script.
>  
>  I only recently discovered the fedora-mingw project and would like to
>  know how the cross-toolchains from both projects differ. Are there any
>  reasons to favor one above the other? 
I think you will be the expert on the LinuxCrossMinGW chain described
above, since I haven't used it.

I'll point out some features of our chain:

- We use ordinary GCC, with MinGW's binutils, runtime & W32API.

- We supply lots of precompiled libraries (http://annexia.org/fedora_mingw).

- We add a few extra custom scripts/tools like nsiswrapper and
mingw32-configure.  To make things easier to build.

- We are completely 100% open source.  We supply the source (as
*.src.rpm) in a way that makes it easy for people to reproduce our
builds from scratch.  Probably also a feature of the LinuxCrossMinGW
chain, but it's worth pointing out.

- We want to encourage commercial software on top of our chain.  So
there are no licensing impediments, except where those are imposed on
us by the upstream library (eg. readline).

- We are very focused on Fedora, RPM, yum etc.  Of course any
useful/relevant changes get pushed back into upstream projects, but
the Fedora MinGW project is really about packaging this stuff up for
Fedora & RHEL.

If you have any specific questions, please post them here.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
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[Erik Leunissen]

Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>  On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 11:50:18PM +0100, Erik Leunissen wrote:
> > L.S.
> >
> > For several years, I've been using a linux hosted cross MinGW toolchain,
> > as described by:
> >
> >  http://www.mingw.org/wiki/LinuxCrossMinGW
> >
> > from where I also retrieved the sources and build script.
> >
> > I only recently discovered the fedora-mingw project and would like to
> > know how the cross-toolchains from both projects differ. Are there any
> > reasons to favor one above the other?
>  
>  I think you will be the expert on the LinuxCrossMinGW chain described
>  above, since I haven't used it.
>   
Not really. I'm just a user who is easily satisfied when the toolchain
delivers the goods (the binaries) for my particular case (mostly C, a
bit of C++ lately, no GUI, no X ...).

I know little about the development process for their distribution.

>  I'll point out some features of our chain:
>   
thanks for your quick response.

>  - We use ordinary GCC, with MinGW's binutils, runtime &
> W32API.
>   
By "ordinary GCC" you mean "unaltered sources"?


>  - We supply lots of precompiled libraries
> (http://annexia.org/fedora_mingw).
>   
OK. I'll have a look there.

>  - We add a few extra custom scripts/tools like nsiswrapper and
>  mingw32-configure.  To make things easier to build.
>  
>  - We are completely 100% open source.  We supply the source (as
>  *.src.rpm) in a way that makes it easy for people to reproduce our
>  builds from scratch.  Probably also a feature of the LinuxCrossMinGW
>  chain, but it's worth pointing out.
>  
>  - We want to encourage commercial software on top of our chain.  So
>  there are no licensing impediments, except where those are imposed on
>  us by the upstream library (eg. readline).
>  
>  - We are very focused on Fedora, RPM, yum etc.  Of course any
>  useful/relevant changes get pushed back into upstream projects, but
>  the Fedora MinGW project is really about packaging this stuff up for
>  Fedora & RHEL.
>   
Do you happen to know whether the focus on Fedora and RHEL would
prohibit me from using it on openSuSE? (which is what I happen to use,
there's nothing much fundamental about that choice).


>  If you have any specific questions, please post them here.
>   
OK, as described above.

Thanks again,

Erik


>  Rich.
>

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 12:42:21AM +0100, Erik Leunissen wrote:
>  By "ordinary GCC" you mean "unaltered sources"?
Yes - I mean we follow Fedora's GCC versions, which are snapshots of
upstream GCC sources (not usually actual GCC releases because of a
peculiarity with Fedora's relationship with GCC).

>  Do you happen to know whether the focus on Fedora and RHEL would
>  prohibit me from using it on openSuSE? (which is what I happen to use,
>  there's nothing much fundamental about that choice). 
We don't support anything except Fedora/RHEL/EPEL/CentOS/etc, but you
are welcome to try it.  (See previous thread on this list about an
Ubuntu user trying to install our RPMs using alien).

Rich.

-- 
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[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 11:57:14PM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
>  On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 12:42:21AM +0100, Erik Leunissen wrote:
>  > By "ordinary GCC" you mean "unaltered sources"?
>  
>  Yes - I mean we follow Fedora's GCC versions, which are snapshots of
>  upstream GCC sources (not usually actual GCC releases because of a
>  peculiarity with Fedora's relationship with GCC).
>  
>  > Do you happen to know whether the focus on Fedora and RHEL would
>  > prohibit me from using it on openSuSE? (which is what I happen to use,
>  > there's nothing much fundamental about that choice).
>  
>  We don't support anything except Fedora/RHEL/EPEL/CentOS/etc, but you
>  are welcome to try it.  (See previous thread on this list about an
>  Ubuntu user trying to install our RPMs using alien). 
Worst case you could probably make it work by just re-building the
core toolchain (mingw32-runtime, -w32apis, -binutils and -gcc). The
actual cross-compiled packages should work just fine, since they're
obviously targetting Win32, not any Linux distro

Daniel
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[Ludwig Nussel]

Erik Leunissen wrote:
>  Do you happen to know whether the focus on Fedora and RHEL would
>  prohibit me from using it on openSuSE? (which is what I happen to use,
>  there's nothing much fundamental about that choice). 
FWIW Robert Schiele started a cross toolchain project in the
openSUSE buildservice long time ago. It's at
https://build.opensuse.org/project/show?project=CrossToolchain%3Amingw
resp.
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/CrossToolchain:/mingw/

Due due to it's age and lack of ressources/interest it's still based
on gcc3 though.
Might be worth looking at for the Fedora developers too as it
bootstraps itself without the need for precompiled runtime etc.

cu
Ludwig

-- 
 (o_   Ludwig Nussel
 //\   
 V_/_  http://www.suse.de/
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nuernberg)

[Erik Leunissen]

Ludwig Nussel wrote:
>  
>  FWIW Robert Schiele started a cross toolchain project in the
>  openSUSE buildservice long time ago. It's at
>  https://build.opensuse.org/project/show?project=CrossToolchain%3Amingw
>  resp.
>  http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/CrossToolchain:/mingw/
>  
>  Due due to it's age and lack of ressources/interest it's still based
>  on gcc3 though. 
The cross-version which is officially supported by project that
generates the mingw sources[*] is 3.4.5 after all. It seems that anyone
willing to support a newer cross-version may be ahead of himself.

[*] mingw.org


Thanks for the info,

Erik.

>  Might be worth looking at for the Fedora developers too as it
>  bootstraps itself without the need for precompiled runtime etc.
>  
>  cu
>  Ludwig
>