Visual Studio status for GTK+ builds

Following up with Emmanuele’s blog posts about GTK+ being “dead” or “dying” I wanted to point out about the status of the MSVC builds for the GTK+ stack. Refer to my previous post to understand how to build it. During this cycle quite a few things have been done in order to further improve the status of the Visual Studio builds.

• The packages have been updated in order to build GTK+ 3.18. This took longer than expected since we actually had to stick with 3.14 until we are finally able to build libepoxy which was the missing dependency in order to build GTK+ > 3.14
• The builder is slowly starting to get support for VS 2015. This is not so easy since we had to fix glib to not use constructors but to use a DllMain. We added a patch to this bug to finally support this properly.
• GTK+ 3.18 depends on an unreleased version of cairo. This means that we had to put some patches downstream in order to be able to build this last version of GTK+. We hope to have a new version of cairo soon though.
• libsoup has got support for msvc projects as well as gsettings-desktop-schemas. A release is needed in order to get them into the builder.
• glib-networking has a wip branch that adds support for msvc projects as well as TLS support for windows using openssl. For more details on this you can refer to my previous post about this.
• libepoxy was fixed upstream in order to build with msvc, although there are still no msvc projects upstream so we had to add them to the builder.
• We are still using an old version of harfbuzz but we are working in order to get new projects that will build the last version. This should also improve the situation for other projects depending on it, like mozilla projects or libreoffice.
• librsvg got support for msvc projects and Federico already made a new release. Now it is just a matter of integrating it in the builder.
• libdb and cyrus-sasl have been added to the builder.
• libffi is now up to date on the builder.
• gobject-introspection got also support for msvc. This is a bit more problematic to get integrated in the builder but we hope to get it done soon.

As usual Chun-wei Fan is the one to thank for keeping the msvc projects up to day and for adding the new ones.