Dear LRN,

1. I would suggest MSYS2 to be used (instead of Cygwin), as a shortcut, as

it cuts down the number of packages that need to be built. Using MSYS2 might also be faster (because compatibility layer will be thinner than

Cygwin).

I made quite extensive tests of cygwin with MinGW cross vs MSys2 and came to the conclusion that cygwin requires much less patching and messing around than MinGW for building most libs. The only advantage of MSys2 is that GTK and all its dependencies are available pre-built, but the MinGW GTK build on cygwin is fairly straight forward, it just takes build time.

On cygwin I mostly use a generic download / configure / make / install shell function for building. Some libraries need a patch or two, but with cygwin this is the exception, not the rule.

I think that maintainability and cleanliness is more important than build time, since most people won't touch the libs and build them at most once a quarter. As long as it is fully automated, I don't care if it takes 3 hours.

Another reason I finally settled with cygwin is that the scripts are 99% identical to what is needed for a cross build on Linux. The deviations with MSys2 tend to be larger.

But I guess this is a topic one can argue about forever. How about we share our scripts, experience and ideas and work on both MSys2 and cygwin+MinGW in parallel and see what is easier in the end? Most of the work is solving specific build issues and it would be great to have someone to discuss this.

I would suggest that we take this off list. I send you my scripts stripped down to what is shared between inkscape and my original project later today via private mail.

Best regards,

Michael