RFR(M): 8057538: Build the freetype library during configure on Windows

[Volker Simonis]

On Sat, Sep 6, 2014 at 2:43 AM, Omair Majid <omajid at redhat.com> wrote:
> * Volker Simonis <volker.simonis at gmail.com> [2014-09-04 13:01]:
>> could you please have a look at the following change which makes it
>> possible to build the freetype libraries during the configure step
>> from the plain freetype sources on Windows:
>>
>> http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~simonis/webrevs/8057538/
>> https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8057538
>>
>> The fact that there are no standard binary packages of freetype
>> available on windows is one of the few remaining annoyances when
>> building the OpenJDK on Windows.
>>
>> It turns out however, that it is relatively simply and needs just a
>> few seconds to build the required libraries from the freetype source
>> ball during the configure process. The only extra dependency which is
>> required is 'msbuild.exe' which comes with the .NET 4.0 installation
>> and as far as I could see, probably most of the Windows boxes will
>> have that anyway.
>
> I am curious why you would like to do it this way. Wouldn't it make more
> sense to make it easy to build freetype as part of the freetype project?
> Why is including this (which is essentially a build script for freetype)
> in OpenJDK a good idea? I am just trying to understand the motivation
> here.
>

Freetype is actually easy to build. You can actually build it with two
toolchains. Either in Cygwin/MinGW, but in that case it will be build
with GCC and will depend on the Cygwin DLL which we don't want. Or you
can build it natively with Visual Studio from a project file (and
that's the version we need).

This change doesn't include a build script at all. It only leverages
the fact that even on Windows there sometimes exist useful command
line tools:) In this case it is 'msbuild.exe' which can be used to
build the targets of a VS project file from the command line (even
without VS - just with the compilers which come with the SDK).

Regards,
Volker

> Also, how about moving this to the equivalent of a contrib directory in
> OpenJDK rather than in configure-proper?
>
> Thanks,
> Omair
>
> --
> PGP Key: 66484681 (http://pgp.mit.edu/)
> Fingerprint = F072 555B 0A17 3957 4E95  0056 F286 F14F 6648 4681