Building Gimp 2.0 on Windows XP?

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!"

Comments

Re:Not too sketchy.

[0x0d0a]

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.

Uhm

[photon317]

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