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

[Volker Diels-Grabsch]

Dear bliako, Gilles and all others who shared their story,

Thanks a lot for your congrats to MXE.  As the creator of this
project, I'm very proud of how MXE developed over the 12 years
if its existence, even though I'm no longer active.

While I was active, I was lucky that this project attracted some very
skilled volunteers, who played astonishingly well in a team.  When I
realized that it becomes harder and harder for me to keep pace and to
find enough spare time to manage and to improve MXE, I handed this
project gradually over to this team.  This team grew, with new people
adding new packages, fighting until those work, ensuring these
continue to work, and introducing modern ideas into the core of MXE,
as well as modernizing the infrastructure around MXE.  In short, this
is the best development of the project I could have wished for.

I'm very proud of the whole team.  It is you who make me smile every
time I look at MXE.  I rarely build for Windows anymore.  But from
time to time I have to.  It is you who ensured that whenever I needed
MXE, it was still there, very alive and up to date.  It is you who
keep it alive, make it grow and ensure MXE becomes better every day.


Thank you!
Volker


ah via Mingw-cross-env-list schrieb:
> 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.
> 

-- 
Volker Diels-Grabsch
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