Thanks and a question or two

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 10:24:31AM -0700, John Stebbins wrote:
> I recently successfully ported my application using these tools. It sure 
> made things easier.  If you curious, the project is currently at 
> hbfork.googlecode.com
> 
> There were a couple packages that I had issues with.
> Your version of mingw32-w32api is too old to build ffmpeg with.  Ffmpeg 
> requires 3.13 or better.

You'll want to use the one from Rawhide.  See the table here:

http://annexia.org/fedora_mingw

I don't routinely backport new packages into earlier version of Fedora
unless someone files a bug about it.

> There is no mingw32-pkgconfig, so configure would use the system 
> pkg-config and use regular system include and library paths and flags.

We use system pkgconfig, but (if you use our mingw32-configure
wrapper) we override an environment variable so that it only returns
packages from the mingw root.  See:

http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/devel/mingw32-filesystem/macros.mingw32?annotate=1.2#l57

However it might be worth having a "mingw32-pkgconfig" shell script
which just sets that variable and runs pkgconfig ...

> I found what I needed to fix these issues here:  
> http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=204414
> Is this project associated with your effort at all?

No.  It's a separate project run by MinGW upstream.  We aim to make
proper Fedora packages (ie. RPMs), not tarballs, so what they are
doing isn't very relevant except occasionally to see how they build
programs.

> This may not be your area of concern, but MinGw has problems with large 
> file support.  They've had a ticket open for it since 2006 and a few 
> patches have been floating around, but no resolution.  I had to patch 
> several things to accommodate.

Any patches like this need to go into the upstream MinGW project.  We
are "just" packaging the runtime and headers that they ship, and we
might even switch over to mingw-w64 upstream (also for 32 bit) since
they are a lot more responsive.

> FYI, the repository liked to from here is currently down: 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW

That's only a temporary repository, don't rely on it too much.  It
should be back up now, it was down because I was rebuilding that
machine.  Any dependencies you care about should be pushed into Fedora
at the earliest opportunity, see:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW/New_package

Rich.

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