Dear Inkscape Team,
I have a proposal for improving the delivery for the windows libs and for setting up a build environment.
The current method of delivering binary libs has two disadvantages:
1.) it restricts the user to a very specific binary gcc build (at least the docs say so).
2.) it is tricky to check if this delivery method is GPL compliant. According to GPL if you deliver binaries you also have to deliver sources, and it is a lot of work to check all libs licenses and to check if all required sources are in the delivery. Please note that it is NOT sufficient to say "this is standard GPL software and you can download the sources from the official sources". If you delivery binaries, you have to deliver the sources.
Now to my proposal: for another open source project I created 2 scripts: one which automatically sets up a fresh cygwin with MinGW cross support and whatever else is needed and another one which downloads and builds a bunch of libraries and apps from sources, including GTK, cairo and pango. About 70% of the libs inkscape requires are built by this script, so it wouldn't be that much work to add the remaining 30%. This does not just setup a build environment and builds everything automatically, it also documents exactly what was used and how it was built (and possibly patched).
So my proposal would be to instead of delivering the libs as binaries and lengthy instructions just deliver these two scripts. The scripts are fairly simple and well documented. The build for inkscape and all its libs from scratch would likely be 2..3 hours on a decent machine.
Would others appreciate such a mechanism to build inkscape on windows? Usually it would be a single call to a DOS batch file to setup cygwin and start the download and build process.
Best regards,
Michael