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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!"

3 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not too sketchy. by baldass_newbie · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

    Black Magic is putting it mildly. You could build a Gentoo system for how long it takes to cygwin configured just so.
    And that's not a knock on Cygwin's fine efforts, it's just the matter of fact. You're trying to dupe an OS's behavior on another OS.

    I started trying to do this very thing and realized what a colossal waste of time it was going to be.

    A good way to see if you have things working would be to try and build freeciv. That'll keep him busy. ;-)

    --
    The opposite of progress is congress
  2. Building a native win32 gimp? by winchester · · Score: 3, Interesting

    IMO it would be a lot more challenging to try and build a native win32 binary. Yes, this means using the dreaded MFC, though I myself would prefer the way cleaner implementation of the ATL (or even the largely undocumented WTL).

    Of course building a Gimp 2 in managed code on the .NET platform would be even more interesting... imagine having a complete managed open source application to run on Longhorn way before anyone else has one...

  3. Re:Build is a discipline all to itself by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    How many software products do you build every night? 1? 5? 10? 50? 100? 500?

    Maybe for a company that only produces a handful of software titles, trusting the build machines to work flawlessly all the time is fine. You can always fire up another build in the morning if during the nightly the build machine ran out of memory or crashed a head or had any of a number of critical errors occur. But such lackadaisical care paid to the build system is not a luxury many companies can afford.