Building XFCE on Cygwin

[Brian J. Tarricone]

On Thu, 8 Jul 2004, Maarten Boekhold wrote:

> I'm now stuck at xfdesktop, for apparently different reasons (didn't try 
> to build any of the other modules yet, changes are good that they will 
> build just fine with the above steps, as long as they don't depend on 
> xfdesktop).

i'd be interested in your error output.  xfdesktop contains some Xlib 
stuff, so that could cause a problem (although, with cygwin/xfree86, i 
would think it should still compile).  at any rate, i don't have any 
interest in patching xfdesktop 4.0.x to compile under cygwin.  CVS HEAD 
would be nice, however.

> Is it possible for the developers of XFCE to add an automake rule that, 
> when on a cygwin system, will add the -no-undefined flag to the various 
> libXXX_la_LDFLAGS lines? That would make a further porting effort a lot 
> easier. I don't know the whole autoconf stuff very well, otherwise I 
> would have provided you with the correct macros already... I'll ask on 
> the cygwin mailing list if somebody can give me a cookbook recipe...

i'm not quite sure why this is needed, since, IIRC, some of those 
libraries do contain unresolved symbols (at link time, anyway).  seems 
like adding -no-undefined would make it _not_ work.  then again, i don't 
always understand libtool all that well....

> I'll try to figure out with help from the cygwin mailing lists how to 
> handle the libtool issue. It seems that the cygwin libtool version is a 
> patched version of 1.5.6, but perhaps the changes are incorporated in a 
> later version of libtool/autoconf/automake?

we're theoretically using 1.5.6 for everything, but the reality is 
really that most of us (myself included) don't have 1.5.6 installed on 
the machines on which we do our dev work.  when all our stuff is 
upgraded, i'd expect that it might work out-of-the-box.

if i were you, i wouldn't bother with the 4.0.x branch.  i'd bet that 
any changes that need to be made to add cygwin support would likely be a 
bit too intrusive for olivier's taste, seeing it's the stable branch.  
hell, i wouldn't feel too great about it, and we all know how much i 
like to b0rk things around here...  try checking out CVS HEAD.  it's 
pretty stable most of the time (i run it both at home and at work).  in 
that case, you should run autogen.sh instead of configure - this will 
pull in the required system libtool for you.

	-brian