[Tux4kids-tuxtype-dev] [Tuxmath-devel] Status of tuxtype and tuxmath Windows builds

[Brendan Luchen]

FWIW, I intend to get native MinGW builds back in shape by the summer.
The holy grail would be getting the CMake build to somehow coexist
with the GNU build.

-Brendan

On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 12:17 PM, David Bruce
<davidstuartbruce at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> One "off-season" goal I had for tuxmath and tuxtype was to set up a
> more easily-reproducible way to make Windows builds for tuxmath and
> tuxtype.  I'm partial to the idea of cross-compilation under Linux, in
> large part because I don't have any Windows machines at my home, and
> don't want to buy any.  The old setup I used for all our previous
> releases worked OK, but had some limitations:
>
> 1.  I was never able to get SDL_Pango support set up.
> 2.  The crossbuild enviroment was a real pain to get up and running -
> it required building about a dozen libraries individually, and several
> of them had issues that required additional work to get built.
>
> (my old crossbuild setup also no longer exists, due to some hardware
> problems with my home desktop that required rebuilding it).
>
> So, I eventually found a project called "mingw-cross-env"
> (http://nongnu.org/mingw-cross-env) which is aimed at supporting
> crossbuilds systematically.  mingw-cross-env is extremely simple to
> set up - basically just check out the project with Mercurial, then go
> to the new mingw-cross-env directory and type "make".  It then builds
> a boatload of libs, including everything we need for tuxmath, tuxtype,
> and tuxpaint.  The mingw-cross-env maintainer has been very helpful,
> even to the point of adding SDL_Pango and librsvg for us, and helping
> me make our configure.ac files more correct and robust.
>
> To make the actual crossbuild, we just do a configure/make with a
> couple simple switches, and we get a win32 executable with all the
> needed libs statically linked.  I've put a couple of (extremely)
> simple scripts into the tuxmath and tuxtype git repositories to
> automate this.  However, there are still a couple of show-stopper
> problems that prevent public releases of mingw-cross-env-based builds:
>
> 1.  Unless sound is disabled, the programs exit unexpectedly at the
> first call to SDL_mixers's Mix_OpenAudio().  From what I can tell on
> mailing lists and my own testing, it seems to be a problem with use of
> pthreads by the SDL_mixer code.
> 2.  With SDL_Pango enabled, the program builds and runs without
> crashing, but it doesn't actually display any text.  If SDL_Pango is
> disabled at configure time, SDL_ttf doesn't get detected and the
> program won't build without some special hacking measures.
>
> However, once I get tuxtype built with SDL_ttf and turn off sound, the
> resultant binary works perfectly in Windows.
>
> For tuxmath, we also need to use SDL_net (and also use libtool in the
> build), which generate some errors that I haven't really figured out
> yet.
>
> All of the above is most of what I have been doing with my available
> Tux4Kids time in recent months.
>
> So, we are tantalizingly close to having a straightforward, automated
> way to make Windows builds.
>
> Regards,
>
> David
>
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