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Building Gimp 2.0 on Windows XP?

Posted by Cliff on from the why-not? dept.

Anonymouse asks: "Has anyone out there just had the urge to build Gimp 2.0 on Windows instead of using an installer made by a third party, hosted on a free web hosting service? It's probably fine but it makes me nervous, so I figure I should try building it on Windows instead...besides, it could be educational! Does anyone have any instructions/suggestions for building the source on Windows XP using MinGW and MinSYS? Keep in mind I have no experience with *nix, and my meek programing skillz only apply to Perl. Thanks!"

5 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not too sketchy. by 0x0d0a · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you really want to compile from scratch, do it on Linux first with native Linux programs. When you get the hang of that, move to Windows. I'm all for sink-or-swim type trials, but, in this case, I think you'll sink. Very quickly.

    Second that. Most software builds are much more extensively tested and used (and made easier and more reliable to build) under Linux. Linux distros come with a good set-up-in-a-standard-manner development toolset.

    A lot of Windows port work isn't kept up-to-date.

    Putting together your own cygwin or mingw toolchain (not that that's a bad idea in general) already is a severe pain in the ass. It can be real black magic to figure out what people last did to get primarily-used-on-UNIX-software building. When you couple that with the fact that there are all *sorts* of interesting problems that come up on Windows (case sensitivity suddenly existing, line feeds mattering, etc) things can get much more interesting.

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  2. Uhm by photon317 · · Score: 3, Insightful


    Doesn't this belong on an appropriate mailing list or something?

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  3. Re:Not too sketchy. by 0x0d0a · · Score: 2, Insightful

    That should be "case insensitivity".

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  4. And why don't you... by DarkDust · · Score: 2, Insightful

    And why don't you just go to the GIMP homepage, subscribe to the GIMP mailing list and ask the developers ?

    Seriously, if you're so lazy that you're using Ask Slashdot instead of their mailing list you should stick with the installer ! Especially since compiling GIMP 2.0 is diving into dependency hell (you'll need to compile about half a dozen libraries first, ATK, glib, GTK+, ... all in the correct order and with the right options (like Xft support, and if you want to use your graphic tablet you need XInput... at least on Linux/UNIX, YMMV on Windows of course)).

  5. Re:Build is a discipline all to itself by Karora · · Score: 2, Insightful
    • Many software shops have dedicated build teams that do nothing more than make sure that the software is rebuilt from source every day. This entails tweaking build scripts, makefiles, and making sure that the proper libraries are available for the compiler and linker

    Really? I don't know about other people, but where I work we do this stuff with computers!

    Maintaining a team of people to autobuild would be really expensive, but maintaining a couple of computers to do it has mostly involved some setup costs.

    And it has been utterly fantastic, in terms of making sure we don't deliver broken software :-)

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    ...heellpppp! I've been captured by little green penguins!