current status

[Kalev Lember]

On 05/24/2011 05:06 PM, Farkas Levente wrote:
> hi,
> at the beginning i was active on this list but there was some other
> important stuff. but now it seems we need it again. so what is the
> current status? i see there are new packages mingw- is there any docs.
> what should we've to know? etc

Hi Farkas,

Glad to have you back, there have indeed been some new developments.

Erik has been working on switching over from mingw.org toolchain to the
mingw-w64 one. Among other things, the mingw-w64 toolchain has a much
wider win32 API coverage and supports both 32 bit and 64 bit Windows
targets.

The Fedora Packaging Committee has already approved guidelines for the
mingw-w64 toolchain, but the guidelines are currently on hold until the
toolchain is actually imported in Fedora (there are some possible legal
problems with the new toolchain that are being investigated). Right now
the current guidelines are the ones under Packaging:MinGW [1] and the
ones under Packaging:MinGW_Future [2] are on hold; not sure when that
might change.

One of the things that changes with the "MinGW_Future" guidelines is
that the source packages are going to move into mingw- namespace and the
binary packages are going to be named mingw32- and mingw64- respectively.

To ease the transition and to avoid having to rename packages from
mingw32- to mingw- in the future when the "MinGW_Future" guidelines are
activated, the FPC recently decided to also allow new source packages
(keep in mind that we are still using the "old" guidelines) to be named
mingw-. The example spec file [3] covers how to do that.

Another development is the mingw32-filesystem we have in rawhide now
supports RPM 4.9 new "fileattr" dependency generator, which means that
packages can now drop the following boilerplate macros if they want to:
%global _use_internal_dependency_generator 0
%global __find_requires %{_mingw32_findrequires}
%global __find_provides %{_mingw32_findprovides}

Nothing changes for existing packages but it gives the option to remove
these lines for the packagers that want to do so. I'm also planning to
eventually backport the mingw32-filesystem changes to F15, so that
people who need to keep rawhide and F15 spec files in sync, are able to
do so. But F15 is already out and we should strictly limit the changes
we are doing and concentrate new development in rawhide.

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:MinGW
[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:MinGW_Future
[3] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:MinGW#Example_Specfile

Hope this helps,
Kalev