[Kstars-devel] Building KStars on Windows on Cygwin

[Akarsh Simha]

As some of you know, the KDE on Windows project has made the last
release of it's installer at 4.x
There's a reason the frameworks is not yet released: 1. It's new
stuff, 2. The entire methodology is different for good reason.

(I'm not an expert on KDE on Windows, so I might be wrong).

The entire idea of Frameworks was to break down kdelibs and try to
move as much to Qt so that a KDE application is just like any other
cross-platform app written with Qt, but with some KF5 dependencies.
KF5 has tiny chunks of kdelibs as separate components. A quick look at
CMakeLists.txt tells us what components we use. So this change solve
the entire "bloatware" problem of the old KDE on Windows installer --
which installed a gazillion things from kdebase etc that the user
might have no interest in if they're interested only in one of our
awesome unique apps like okular, marble, kstars, krita or many others.

I tried the following experiment, namely building KStars and running
it on Cygwin. Cygwin essentially emulates UNIX-like API on Windows. It
already has linux versions of the libQt5Foo, libKF5Foo, cmake, gcc/g++
designed to run on Windows by leveragin "cygwin1.dll". This means that
an app that used Cygwin/g++ and these libraries to build would run
like a Linux app emulated on Windows. So Qt's powerful cross-platform
abilities to run natively on Windows using Windows API is not used.
Also, one needs Xorg server to run GUI apps. This makes it very slow,
and unusable.

But KStars built with some minimal changes, and runs, except it's too
slow to be useful. At least on my Virtual Windows machine.

If any of you wish to try it on a native Windows box and have success,
this is one possible method to compile the git master of KStars on
Windows very easily.

Regards
Akarsh