[Bug 467260] Review Request: mingw32-filesystem - MinGW base filesystem and environment

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https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=467260





--- Comment #5 from Richard W.M. Jones <rjones at redhat.com>  2008-10-17 18:40:37 EDT ---
Basically, what Daniel said in comment 4.

I'll explain it in slightly different terms:-

Let's say we build zlib (bug 454416).  When we run our find-requires
script as part of rpmbuild, they will find the list of DLLs which zlib1.dll
depends
on.  In the particular case of zlib, it's KERNEL32.dll & msvcrt.dll.  These are
in
the "normal" case proprietary, non-free Windows binaries.

So the question arises, how did we build zlib1.dll given that we don't have
these proprietary libraries around?

We built them from the w32api package, which is a Public Domain set of header
files that duplicate the headers found in Windows dev kits, and provide stubs.
As Dan explained, Windows DLLs really come in two parts - the library of
functions
itself and a set of stub routines that you link to the caller.  In w32api the
stubs are in
%{_mingw32_libdir}/libkernel32.a, which is compiled from public domain source
by our open source gcc/binutils toolchain.[*]

We want to be able to build & install mingw32-zlib without necessarily needing
to
install wine.  (And certainly not needing to install Windows!)  There is no
requirement
to have wine installed in order to use the mingw toolchain to develop software
(ie.
to compile more stuff on top of it), so why require that?

So for expediency, this base package "provides" the "missing" DLLs.  Another
way to
do it would be to exclude these proprietary DLLs in our find-requires checking
script - essentially it comes out the same either way.

[*] If it sounds like I'm over-emphasizing the completely free / open source
nature of this, then I am.  People don't believe that this can be built from
100%
Free (as in speech) software, but it is.

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