[Mingw-cross-env-list] MXE: best thing since ice-cream

[ah]

Dear MXE,

Last night you saved me from the most humiliating, degrading, 
frustrating and time-wasting experience a human developer could have.

I am developing a Qt application to target both Linux, OSX and windows. 
My development is done entirely in and for Linux, occassionally OSX. 
Buit this time they needed that 3rd "OS" too.

And so, last night I thought it was time I produced a windows executable 
to give to testers. Coming from the unix world I thought that would be 
straight-forward. Having not used windows for the last 5 years I thought 
developing in/for them must have improved. I mean the world improves and 
goes on. Alas, little I knew.

I started a virtual machine of windows 8.1 and spent two hours removing 
privacy infringement and opting out from all perverted use of my private 
data. Then it was time to install Qt and visual studio and what not.

QtCreator kept coming up with all these pathetic messages like clang++ 
can not produce executables, cl can not be found, mingw-g++ targets a 
different ABI, libQtXYZ.a can not be found (obviously because the Qt 
installed QtXYZ.a) and on and on the ordeal went until the early hours. 
Windows runtime detector can not be found. I tried everything included 
re-installing Qt 4 or 5 times. I tried the command line but there things 
were not only worse but that thing they call a terminal was plain hell 
to navigate, to copy-paste, to retype commands, to copy paste paths with 
unix-separators, QtCreator complained about. I had enough and 
re-installed the windows virtual machine so that I never be tempted to 
try it again.

Then I saw on the Qt forum someone advising that mxe could do 
cross-compiling. And I said, yeah right! The whole micro$oft corporation 
can not put this right and some hackers managed to put together and 
distribute for free a system to not only compile this but 
CROSS-COMPILE??? That's a mean task even for hardened hackers.

I let the computer compile mxe and went to sleep without any expectations.

Now I am back on the console and pleasantly surprised to see it did 
compile and it did fetched hundreds of 3rd party packages and did 
compiled them too without complain or a miss! Wow! (*)

By following some very simple instructions, I managed to cross-compile 
my application and all its 3rd-party dependencies without a glitch or a 
complain. It even works on that platform from lleh.

Guys and girls from MXE you are indispensable and you add good karma 
unlike the corporate execs with the suits and the ties.

Keep the good work you do,

XXX

bliako

(*) with the exception of gcc. This was the very first package to be 
downloaed and installed. But it failed with the message:

Assembler messages:
Fatal error: no compiled in support for x86_64

But thankfully I found the solution in mxe forum here: 
https://github.com/mxe/mxe/issues/173

Something in my PATH caused it to fail. By just setting it to something 
minimal like:

export PATH='/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin'

it worked like a charm.