On Sat, Jul 31, 2010 at 06:07:41PM -0500, Rugxulo wrote:
The only reason (AFAICT) to use MinGW is if you don't need POSIX and just want "fast and simple" binaries or if you dislike the Cygwin .DLL license issue.
No, I use MinGW because it is AFAICT the only compiler to build Windows executables for which you don't have to have a Windows system. ;-)
I meant vs. Cygwin. In other words, I see a lot of MinGW projects.
I also meant versus Cygwin. I am not aware that Cygwin could be used as a cross compiler. I know no distribution that has a Cygwin cross compiler, but many have a MinGW cross compiler.
Since both use GCC, you should "in theory" be able to cross compile from any valid host (even DJGPP). In practice, that doesn't always work
I do crosscompile my software... with MinGW... in practice.
(or is hard to do, at least for me).
Well, while the distributions come with MinGW, but you still often have to install the needed libraries for cross compiling. That can be some hard work. But once it is done, it is done.
Line oriented programs which do not need special libraries, work out of the box.
Well, afaik Fedora comes with a lot of Windows libraries packaged for crosscompiling.
No, and sorry, that's not what I meant. ;-) I meant that some things are impossible to build or have horrible dependencies. In other words, I wonder what they were thinking! (This applies to any OS, lots of hard-to-reproduce builds from source code.)
If you are new to GNU/Linux, stay with the packages that the distribution offers. That's how it's meant to be. Manual installation of software should be the exception.