Cross compiling Glade for win32

It was a long time since I did not give cross compiling a try and it turns out to be easier than expected if you use precompiled binaries from windows:mingw[1] project on the OpenSUSE Build Service. (OBS)

First of all we need to install the cross compiler, in Debian and Debian based distros do

$ sudo apt-get install mingw-w64

Then we need to download a python script [2] that makes downloading mingw packages from OBS easy.

wget https://github.com/mkbosmans/download-mingw-rpm/raw/master/download-mingw-rpm.py

Now we can download the dependencies (hicolor-icon-theme is only needed at runtime)

python3 download-mingw-rpm.py --deps gtk3-devel libxml2-devel \
        hicolor-icon-theme

This will unpack everything under usr/i686-w64-mingw32/sys-root/mingw

Next we need to setup some variables for the cross compilation

export CC=i686-w64-mingw32-gcc
export MINGW_ROOT=`readlink -f usr/i686-w64-mingw32/sys-root/mingw`
export PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR=$MINGW_ROOT/lib/pkgconfig
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$MINGW_ROOT/share/pkgconfig
export PKG_CONFIG="pkg-config --define-variable=prefix=$MINGW_ROOT"

CC: the cross compiler
MINGW_ROOT: is an absolute path we are going to use as a prefix for our build
PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR: this way we tell pkg-config to use mingw libs
PKG_CONFIG_PATH: just to make sure we are not pointing some where else
PKG_CONFIG: ask pkg-config to replace .pc files prefix variable with the real path

And this is pretty much it, now we can proceed to run autogen.sh with –host and –target flags and glade should compile

git clone git://git.gnome.org/glade
cd glade
./autogen.sh --prefix=$MINGW_ROOT --host i686-w64-mingw32 \
--target i686-w64-mingw32 --enable-shared=yes --enable-static=no
make
make install

Before you can run it you need to update glib schemas bin file

glib-compile-schemas $MINGW_ROOT/share/glib-2.0/schemas

BTW there is a scrip file that automates this process and creates a windows installer using nsis
in glade sources under build/mingw-w64 directory.

1) https://build.opensuse.org/project/show?project=windows%3Amingw%3Awin32
2) https://github.com/mkbosmans/download-mingw-rpm