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Revision as of 15:04, 13 November 2008 by Rjones (talk | contribs) (→‎Owner: Add email address as required by FESCo)

Windows cross-compiler

Note.png
This is a proposed feature for Fedora 11

Summary

Build and test full-featured Windows programs, from the comfort of the Fedora system, without needing to use Windows.

Owner

Please send any email correspondence about this feature to the fedora-mingw mailing list (you do not need to be subscribed).

Current status

  • Targeted release: Fedora 11
  • Last updated: 2008-10-28
  • Percentage of completion: 20%

Detailed Description

The Fedora MinGW project's mission is to provide an excellent development environment for Fedora users who wish to cross-compile their programs to run on Windows, minimizing the need to use Windows at all. In the past developers have had to port and compile all of the libraries and tools they have needed, and this huge effort has happened independently many times over. We aim to eliminate duplication of work for application developers by providing a range of libraries and development tools which have already been ported to the cross-compiler environment. This means that developers will not need to recompile the application stack themselves, but can concentrate just on the changes needed to their own application.

Benefit to Fedora

There are two primary benefits for Fedora users.

Firstly, developers who are asked to write software for Windows will no longer need to deal with Windows and all the proprietary compilers/software on top of Windows. Instead they can throw a "configure switch" and build (and test) the software without leaving Fedora.

Secondly — and this is the long term goal — it should mean that Windows users can have a greater choice of higher quality open source applications available to them. (Developers who are primarily Linux users will actually be able to produce daily builds for Windows and respond to bug reports from Windows users, so the quality will generally improve). Windows users can use these applications instead of the usual choice of closed, proprietary, expensive apps, giving them at least some freedom. Once they are used to the high quality free applications available, it will be much easier for them to switch to a fully open platform.

The GNU project started out in much the same way by providing much better quality command-line tools for proprietary platforms such as SunOS, and eventually SunOS users liked them so much they switched over to GNU on Linux.

Scope

Requires importing the libraries and development tools from our repository.

Test Plan

User Experience

Dependencies

Contingency Plan

Documentation

Release Notes