Cross-building Windows binaries using the mingw toolchain

[Florian Weimer]

On 05/02/2014 08:26 AM, Ivan Krylov wrote:

 > Suppose you are working on a
> cross-platform bug or feature. You want to make sure that the fix works
> on Windows as well. I would think that testing the fix with
> cross-compiled build would be insufficient for the reasons that Volker
> lists. If the produced bits aren't the same (and they won't be the same)
> we can not trust the results of such testing.

Even with native tools, the builds do not match what others will end up 
with.  I generally won't test with the patches downstream distributions 
use, especially those who have closed patches, and there are also quite 
significant differences in compiler versions and build environment. 
This isn't really specific to OpenJDK—you can often avoid such issues by 
not going all too crazy with boundary conditions etc.

Would building with mingw64 make things worse?  Could be, but we don't 
really know at this point.

-- 
Florian Weimer / Red Hat Product Security Team