Patch to make Windows build use autotools

[John Bailey]

On 08/24/2010 02:04 PM, Daniel Atallah wrote:
> Folks,
> 
> A couple months ago, a patch was submitted to make the autotools stuff
> capable of building Pidgin (http://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/12218).
> 
> I think it is a reasonable thing to do for uses like that ticket
> mentions, but I don't have any plans for this to replace the existing
> hand edited mingw Makefiles (mainly because it is a PITA to set up a
> working autotools build environment on Windows).
> 
> I'd like to get the thoughts and opinions of other folks about committing this.

My primary concern is that this is going to cause even more confusion than there
already is about Windows building.  As things stand now, when the build blows up
and someone asks about it, we have the simple answer of "we don't support using
the configure script on Windows."  This is particularly helpful currently
because only a handful of us that are ever active in #pidgin and on the support
list have a clue how to construct a Windows build environment.  If the configure
script becomes a "viable" option for people, they're going to come seeking
support when they can't figure out what they screwed up and even fewer people
among us are going to be able to help.  (I likely wouldn't get up to speed on it
anytime soon, and I can't imagine that there will be a mad rush on it.)

A lesser, but still valid, concern is perhaps something that most people aren't
going to care about, but I'll throw it out there anyway.  If I'm building
something with cygwin and I use the configure script, I expect that it will
build the package *for* cygwin.  Currently that doesn't work with Pidgin.  If we
advertise that the configure script is now usable on Windows, we're going to
have at least some people thinking that means they should be able to build
cygwin binaries, when that won't be the case.

Overall, while I agree that on the surface this seems reasonable for the use
cases described on the ticket, I'm not so sure I like the idea of doing it.  If
this were a 100% foolproof way of doing things and it were reasonable to use
this and get rid of the hand-crafted Makefile.mingw's all over the tree, I'd be
much more inclined to agree with it.

John

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