Cross-building Windows binaries using the mingw toolchain

[Florian Weimer]

On 04/30/2014 07:00 PM, Volker Simonis wrote:

> But why can't you install Cygwin and the free Microsoft Express/SDK
> compilers and do a native build.

I finally got it to work.  When running on 64-bit Windows, you have to 
specify --with-target-bits=32, otherwise building with Visual Studio 
Express will fail.  It's obvious in retrospect, but somewhat difficult 
to figure out, considering that ./configure explicitly ignores the 
failure to locate the 64-bit environment variables file from Visual Studio.

All in all, it's relatively painless, so I will stick with that for the 
time being.  (I'm not actually eager to spend time on Windows-only 
enhancements, anyway.)

> Doing that you could be
> sure that you really test what others (i.e. especially Oracle) will
> get.

See my reply to Ivan.  I have no illusions that my non-cross 
environments are very close to anything anyone uses to build supported 
binaries.  At some level, this sucks, but that's life with heavily 
patched or proprietary downstreams.

-- 
Florian Weimer / Red Hat Product Security Team