Re: Windows Patches [Was: GNU Libtool 2.2.8 released (stable)]

[Neil Jerram]

On 8 June 2010 09:17, Vincent Torri <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> even if you install mingw cross toolchain on linux ? You can even test
> Windows CE with cegcc on linux

FWIW, my experience is that the mingw cross toolchain on linux is not
a close enough approximation of the "real thing" on Windows; the
problems being that

1. Builds often involve running the built executables.  There are a
few possible solutions for this, but all of them are departures from
what happens in a full native build.

2. Once you have a complete build, there are still many runtime
issues, and to find those you obviously have to run the built
executables.

3. You can use Wine to try to address (1) and (2), but that isn't a
perfect emulation, and it's easy to run into problems that turn out to
be Wine-specific.

Therefore, if one is going to support Windows at all, I think it needs
to be done with MinGW/MSYS on Windows.

(For the sake of balance, I should say that it's pretty cool that you
can run the cross toolchain and Wine on Linux, and that they get as
close as they do.  But some applications it may not be close enough.)

Regards,
        Neil