buildsystem for kde on windows

[Holger Schröder]

Hi list,

i think we need some kind of buildsystem to build kde and its dependencies. 
the situation as it is now does not really scale, as many of us are fighting 
with the same problems over and over again, instead of being able to "start 
with real work", like fix problem in the kde tests.

attached you find a small tar package, which contains some python scripts, 
which can be used to fetch the programs needed to install kde, and install 
them into the system. it is inspired by the gentoo portage buildsystem. it 
builds qt, kdewin32 and kdelibs using mingw. of course it still has some 
problems, but the basic idea would be to put this somewhere under subversion 
control, so that we all could have the most recent version of these scripts, 
and would be able to collaborate better, as every problem only has to be 
fixed once.

i think the kde-windows-installer is great, and this should not replace it, 
but for developing it would be better, if more people are easily able to 
build from the sources, instead of installing binary packages. if i 
understand it correctly, mainly ralf and christian are building the win32libs 
package, and similar. that would only be two people with that knowledge, and 
we others either depend on them, or have to work out how to compile that by 
ourselves, which costs time, which could be spent more effective.

the knowledge about how to compile things is with this approach in the files 
in this archive, and everybody can read what they do and extend them. with it 
it is possible to take a computer with a stock windows xp install, install 
python on it, and then "bootstrap" the whole 
mingw,...,win32libs,dbus,qt,kdewin32,kdelibs,... and this would help us, 
because then we see problems, like libs, which are installed on someones 
computer, that are needed, but were installed without this system. and so we 
would fix it. this could even be automated to see from time to time, that 
everything is still fine.

one other advantage of it in my opinion is, that it is not installing 
libraries "somewhere into the system", but keeps everything under a directory 
of your choice. so it is always quite clear, what on this system is from kde, 
and what is from windows or something else.

to thest this thing you have to do the following:

- make some directory for kde development, i chose e:\foo\thirdroot
- extract the attached archive into it. you should have a directory emerge in 
it, for me e:\foo\thirdroot\emerge.
- in emerge\kdeenv.bat you should change the KDEROOT variable to point to your 
kde root dir.
- make sure you have python version 2.5 installed.
- execute KDEROOT\emerge\kdeenv.bat to set the environment variables
- type emerge kdelibs

this will try to install the needed things to build kdelibs. it is only tested 
on one computer by me, so use at your own risk...

please tell me what you think about this approach to simplify starting with 
kde development under windows. right now it only works with mingw, but 
extension to msvc should not be too hard.

(i hope the mail is not too big for the list...)

regards, Holger
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