Re: [Qemu-devel] Patch to add support for building in MSYS2 on Windows

[Stefan Weil]

On 08/24/16 09:44, Evan Hunter wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I noticed that QEMU would not compile on Windows in the MSYS2 environment.
> Here is a patch that adds a check for it to the configure script and
> amended some ifdefs so it now builds.
>
> At the bottom of this email is a build script I made for building under
> MSYS2, however I am
> not sure if it is suitable merging nor where it should go.
>
> Regards,
>
> Evan Hunter

Hi Evan,

I'm not sure whether adding support for MSYS2 builds is a good idea or 
not. Supporting several build environments for QEMU for Windows requires 
a lot of time. Currently we only support MinGW-w64. It has several 
advantages:

* 32 and 64 bit builds supported
* cross builds on Linux (Redhat, Debian, others) supported
* cross builds on Windows with Cygwin supported
* native builds on Windows supported

AFAIK Redhat includes all packages needed for the cross builds.
Cygwin also has excellent package support.
Debian only includes the build tools, but can use Cygwin packages.

In most cases it is sufficient to test QEMU builds with MinGW-w64 on one 
platform, and all others will work, too. Usually QEMU developers will 
run their tests using Linux (me too).

For MSYS2, we'd need additional build tests running on Windows (please 
correct me if I am wrong - I have no own experience with MSYS2). What 
would be the advantages of supporting MSYS2?

Maybe you could start with documenting the MSYS2 based build process on 
http://wiki.qemu.org/Hosts/W32 and refer to a QEMU git clone which 
includes the necessary modifications.

More feedback also from other contributors whether MSYS2 support is 
wanted or not would be helpful.

Kind regards,
Stefan Weil