KDE Windows and releases

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 19.12.07 10:34:50, Ralf Habacker wrote:
> Shane King schrieb:
> > Just had a few thoughts about how KDE is going to work on Windows as a 
> > finished product somewhere along the line. For background, my blog post 
> > about Amarok Windows releases:
> >
> > <http://amarok.kde.org/blog/archives/550-Windows-binaries-and-packaging.html>
> >
> > As I see it, sometime in the not too distant future, Amarok 2 is going 
> > to go alpha on Linux, and we'd like to go alpha on Windows too. The 
> > difficulty is that you can really only have one KDE 4 installation per 
> > user (or at least only be running from one installation at a time), so 
> > to play nice with others, Amarok can't really package its own KDE 
> > libraries, there needs to be an "official" distribution.
> >
> >
> > For this to happen, I think we'd need to do the following:
> >
> > * We need to pick a compiler. Keeping things compiling under multiple 
> > compilers is a good thing so we can change with circumstances, but for 
> > releases to work we need an official compiler.
> >
> > Lets be honest: MSVC compiles faster, produces smaller binaries, (IMO 
> > seems to) produces faster code, has a better debugging environment, is 
> > the standard for windows development, just works with the PSDK without 
> > having to write your own headers and hasn't had the lead developer quit. 
> > On the other hand, the politics of choosing it over mingw are difficult. 
> > Not sure how you decide that one, glad it's not my call. ;)
> >   
> This was discussed already on the KDE on windows meeting this year in 
> berlin very intensive
> 
> One of reasons why msvc wasn't taken as prefered compiler was that qt 
> has no official msvc support. This reason has gone because Trolltech has 
> official support for the msvc 2005 compiler.
> 
> On more reason against msvc was the hope that big companies would 
> sponser further mingw development - Jaruslav: Do you have news about this ?

Another reason against MSVC is that at least my installation from
sometime in the summer has since "run out", i.e. I can't start the
express edition anymore. Christian said this wouldn't be the case on the
"latest" 2005 Express Edition, but the download from MS is still the
same that I got back then.

> One reason against mingw was that debugging kde applications with gdb 
> would be very hard because of very very long debug info loading time and 
> that there is no gui available - is anyone there who can give an update ?

Well, there's KDevelop4, though I have to admit that I don't know what
the compiling state of that is at the moment. Also it'll need at least
gdb 6.7, probably 6.8 to work properly. And with 6.8 the
debug-info-loading stuff should be much better, because breakpoints in
shared libs are fixed there, so you don't have to stop gdb after each
shared-lib-load and re-set all breakpoints.

Andreas

-- 
Don't hate yourself in the morning -- sleep till noon.