Building XFCE on Cygwin

[Maarten Boekhold]

Hi all,

OK, I seem to be getting the hang of how to do the porting of XFCE to 
cygwin. In most cases it is sufficient to add -no-undefined to the 
LDFLAGS of libraries, and to add @XFCE_MCS_MANAGER_LIBS/CFLAGS@ to the 
Makefile.am of those libraries (which also pulls in the xfce4util, 
xfcegui4 and glib/gtk libraries).

There's still some unclarity on how to handle the plugins, i.e. panel 
plugins and mcs plugins (xfce4-session currently only fails to build 
because it uses mcs_plugin_check_version, which is defined in the 
xfce-mcs-manager binary as far as I can tell).

According to the cygwin list there are two ways of handling libraries 
that refer to symbols defined inside executables: (1) extract all the 
'exported' functions from those executables and put them in a separate 
shared library, and (2) create stub libraries for those exported symbols.

I suspect that the XFCE developers would be less than enthousiastic 
about option 1, as it seems fairly invasive to me. But 2 should be 
possible. I still haven't figured out the details of how to do (2) yet, 
but I'm working on it.

I suggest that as soon as we have an 'approved' way of handling this, I 
start submitting patches to this list? The patches really seem very 
minimal at the moment: just some configure.ac and Makefile.am stuff...

Maarten