Re: Windows port?

["J. Lewis Muir" <jlmuir%imca-cat.org@localhost>]

On 05/18, Jason Bacon wrote:
> If access to the pkgsrc collection is what you want, how about running
> NetBSD under VirtualBox?  It might run under Hyper-V as well, but I
> have no personal experience.

No, that's not what I want; I want to use pkgsrc to build packages
for Windows that do not link with cygwin1.dll.  An issue I've seen
with Cygwin is that it seems unable to link a binary with certain
vendor-supplied libraries (e.g., "error adding symbols: File in wrong
format").  As far as Cygwin licensing goes, I haven't looked into it
to see if linking with cygwin1.dll would be a problem.  But really my
biggest desire is for a truly native build for Windows.  I'd be happy
with building using MinGW, Mingw-64, or Microsoft's free Visual Studio
Community IDE (which comes with the needed tools for compiling from the
command line).

Basically, I want pkgsrc to be a cross-platform package build system.
I have software that can be built for macOS, Linux, and Windows (among
others).  For the Windows build, I find myself writing a script to
automate downloading distribution files, checksumming, extracting,
patching, configuring, etc., and it's obvious that I'm doing all the
things that pkgsrc already does, so then naturally I wish to just
be able to use pkgsrc to build packages that I need on Windows.  (I
also need to build some of the same packages for VxWorks, but that
would require pkgsrc to support cross-compiling from Linux, and my
understanding is that cross-compiling support in pkgsrc is either dead
or incomplete.)

FWIW, the software I have in mind is EPICS [1] and many of the modules
written for it, but it doesn't need to be limited to this.  For example,
one of the EPICS modules is areaDetector which has a plug-in called
ffmpegServer which uses the FFmpeg library to create an MPEG video
stream.  Right now, I just use precompiled FFmpeg binaries for Windows,
but in a perfect world I could build those from source for Windows with
pkgsrc.  Since FFmpeg depends on a number of libraries [2], I'd want
pkgsrc to be able to build all of those for Windows as well.

Lewis

[1] https://epics.anl.gov/
[2] https://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/readme/win32/shared/ffmpeg-20180518-8e7b13b-win32-shared-readme.txt