X64 MSVC KDE

[Jens Peters]

"Casper van Donderen" 
<casper.vandonderen at gmail.com> wrote in 
message 
news:1845503283-1250934733-cardhu_decombobulator_blackberry.rim.net-163441026- at bxe1080.bisx.produk.on.blackberry...
> As promised on IRC during the week I tried to start to compile x64 KDE 
> packages for Windows.
>
> This causes a lot of problems with the dependencies (the GNU ones) because 
> these need to be compiled as x64 as well. The only way to compile these is 
> with mingw-w64. I spent some time on their IRC channel yesterday 
> OFTC:#mingw-w64. And came to the conclusion after some trying that:
> A) I'm not good enough with the GNU tools to get the toolchain setup 
> properly.
> B) It is easiest to compile these dependencies from Linux. The cygwin 
> package is only 32-bit so then I run 64-bit Windows with a 32-bit compiler 
> for libtool to compile 64-bit libs.
>
> So if there are any cross-compiling guru's here for the dependencies I 
> would be willing to try again. But for now I'm going back to 32-bit Amarok 
> Windows testing/compiling.
>
> Casper


Hi Casper,

I decided a few days ago to try an x64 build purely with VC9 as wel. 
Compiling the dependencies is most time really  tiresome but finally I could 
compile and run (!) kdegames, kdeedu (without openbabel and cfitsio) and 
kdemultimedia for x64. Beside the (partly huge) troubles with the gnu libs I 
had to patch several kde files as wel. Nearly all of the changes went into 
replacing inline asm code. So there is some work left as well.

But I have to say that once things got compiled they do work! I really 
enjoyed the moment when I started a kde program (kreversi.exe in my case) 
for the first time :)  and I was quite impressed to be able to view a video 
in dragon player. But unfortunately I wasn't able to compile libgp-error 
with msvc, so I couldn't build kopete which was my goal in the first place 
:(

So my conclusion is more or less that x64 is possible but in a long term I 
guess there must be a workable solution for the deps otherwise you will 
really just end up patching buildsystems over and over again. May kde for 
windows should even drop support for msvc at all once mingw64 is stable 
because msvc will naturally always be a second class citizen.

Regards,
Jens

PS: Let me know if you want some more detailed infos.