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Re:Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing ... by rndgermandude on Monday May 02, 2022 @03:48AM (#31232402)
I use WSL with mingw-w64 to cross compile things for native Windows sometimes... e.g. I keep my own builds of ffmpeg and mpv around, as well as some of my own "legacy" tools that I use both on linux and windows natively.

And in this space, it's often a lot easier to get something autotools-based to build than something cmake or meson, at least in my experience. With autotools more often than not all I need to do is to specify the right target hosttriple and be done. With cmake and meson, it's often a fight to figure out how to cross-compile something like that.

This approach of cross-compiling for windows with mingw-w64, sometimes on "proper" linux, sometimes on WSL2, sometimes even on cygwin, seems to be still somewhat common in C/C++ land and in open source in particular, especially for projects that pull in a fair amount of dependencies (such as the aforementioned ffmpeg) - you will find a lot of Windows build guides that say only mingw cross-compilation from linux is supported and tested.

Re:Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing ... by pabs3 on Monday May 02, 2022 @04:11AM (#31232516)
Maintaining MinGW builds of your deps must be annoying, would be nice if some distros had a MinGW partial port/architecture people could use for cross-building other things.
Re:Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats facing ... by rndgermandude on Monday May 02, 2022 @05:00AM (#31232746)
Yeah, it's not always fun :P

There are some projects that try to be partial dependency "package" managers for mingw, but for whatever reason I never really used them, so I cannot comment on how well they work and how up-to-date they are kept.

I guess, I just like fighting with the interwoven mess of build-systems and dependencies sometimes (and really, I don't spend more than maybe 1 or 2 hours a month on that)... a bit like people doing linux-from-scratch, except probably less time consuming than building an entire kernel and userland step-by-step.