[Kde-windows] Providing precompiled additional libs for Msvc

[Jarosław Staniek]

Christian Ehrlicher said the following, On 2005-11-30 19:21:

> to compile kdelibs you need a lot of additional libs. For MinGW it seems
> to be no problem to get them from gnuwin32.sf.net. But those libs can't
> be used for msvc afaik because of function decoration problems (at least
> when the libs export c++- functions). So I decided to compile all of
> them with msvc2005 express. But now I've a problem how to compile those
> libs - some are static and some are shared. I think either all should be
> static or shared but not mixed.
> Also I prefer shared libs because compiling static could lead to
> problems with msvc linker (search google/msdn for LNK4098) when using
> libcmt and msvcrt together. And shared libs are easier to replace when
> they are buggy.

Yeah, static libs are not option in our world.

BTW: I'd like to mention some related topics to consider:
One day we can manage to distribute all dependencies packaged together  - 
developer version with headers and .lib files, and a simpler, user version.

For both, we will most probably need to bundle msvc- and gcc-compatible 
binaries not mentioning bcc if there's large enough interest). Yes, this is 
going to be huge, but once installed should work well, especially when proper 
suffixes (gcc for msvc) for library names are used.

The bad news may be that even kdelibs itself will be sometimes loaded to 
memory in two copies when a user has an app A compiled with msvc and an app B 
compiled with gcc. Is this really a nightmare?
E.g. I'd say Mac OS users have big bundles and still love their boxes... :)

Before someone asks, IMHO it would be a poor strategy to support only 
gcc-based binary distributions, or only msvc-based. Even worst case for me 
would be to have two competing "distros" for gcc vc msvc. All because there 
may be application authors who:

a) build/maintain their FOSS app outside of the KDE SVN and prefer to 
distribute binaries compatible with one (not both) compilers
b) authors of partially or fully closed source apps (or plugins) utilizing kdelibs

What are your opinions?

-- 
regards / pozdrawiam,
  Jaroslaw Staniek / OpenOffice Polska
  Kexi Developer:
      http://www.kexi-project.org | http://koffice.org/kexi
  Kexi support:
      http://www.kexi-project.org/support.html
  KDE3, KDE4 libraries for developing MS Windows applications:
      http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDElibs+for+win32