[Tux4kids-tuxtype-dev] Tux Typing Windows development

[David Bruce]

Hi Kathy,

On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 2:12 AM, Kathy Liszka <luigikitteh at gmail.com> wrote:
> Has anyone worked on Tux Typing in Windows using VC++? I'd like to work on
> it but haven't successfully built it yet. I have SDL (with images, mixer and
> tff) installed and on the path. Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

The SDL list (SDL at lists.libsdl.org) would likely be the best source of
info for developing using VC++.  Have you built other SDL programs
successfully with your IDE setup?  If so, it might not be that big of
a deal to get tuxtype working.  I'm not aware of anyone working on
tuxtype (or tuxmath, which has nearly identical build requirements) in
Windows, and when people have mentioned doing a native windows build
in the past, it has been done with mingw and msys or Code::Blocks.

All of the public releases of tuxtype and tuxmath have been
cross-compiled from Linux - it was simply way easier to do that than
to get a windows build environment working.  Since we started using
mingw-cross-env for the crossbuild, it is easy to set up and nearly
completely automated.  However, when testing issues specific to the
windows build, it does make for a longer cycle to make a change, do
the crossbuild, install on a Windows machine, test, etc. than native
development.

If you just want to work on tuxtype, and you are planning to do it in
Windows simply because you already have a Windows machine with VC++,
the easiest thing in all honesty is going to be to stick a Linux
install on some empty HD space and do it in Linux.  But if you do
stick with the VC++ plan and the issues get worked out, I would be
happy to add any needed project files and README documentation to the
repository.

Also - keep in mind that we use git for our SCM, and git has a
reputation for not being as well-supported on Windows, though perhaps
that is no longer the case.

Hope that helps,

David Bruce