Building GTK+ and Dependencies on Win32

Try the MinGW build

Having failed multiple times with the auto* tools build on win32 (which usually works quite flawless on *NIX) I have done another attempt following Owen's nice description. Trying to repeat some month later the MinGW guys have removed the MingGW-3.2.x.exe and established a new installation. So the old (working) description is only of historic interest. Let's try again

Installation

Download MingGW-4.1.0.exe run it and follow th installation instructions. This time I have choosen d:\minimal\mingw as my installation directory and selected every thing from Current except g77, ada, java, objc which are hopefully not required to build pure C libraries/programs. The new setup tool downloads the selected packackes on demand so exact version tracking became rather difficult - but if it finally works, who cares ?
Download MSYS-1.0.10.exe and install to d:\minimal\msys\1.0. The post installation script tries to find gcc (if it fails doublecheck for typos!).
Download msysDTK-1.0.1.exe and install to d:\minimal\msys\1.0
To keep my root directory (d:\) and my mingw installation clean much of the following goes into d:\minimal\gtk mapped into msys by adding d:/minimal/gtk /gtk to /etc/fstab

Here are my notes about differences:

using ming-3.2.0-rc3, installed to d:\mingw
msys to d:\msys\1.0 normalizing msys result looks promising
(Maybe I've missed that with all my previous attempts)
msysdtk to d:\msys\1.0
from tml's site using the "bleeding edge", that is glib-2.6.4.zip, pkgconfig-0.15.zip, libiconv-1.9.1.bin.woe32.zip, gettext-runtime-0.13.1.zip
(not libgw32c-0.4-lib.zip), but the other extra libs ... to d:\gtk.

Faked gtk-doc


cd gtk-doc
cp gtk-doc.m4 /gtk/share/aclocal
cp gtkdocize /gtk/bin
mkdir -p /gtk/share/gtk-doc/data/
cp gtk-doc.make /gtk/share/gtk-doc/data

export CVSROOT=:pserver:hans@cvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome
or if you don't have a gnome cvs account
export CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@anoncvs.gnome.org:/cvs/gnome
cvs get -r pango-1-8 pango (something with make install was broken there), so cvs up -A (to get HEAD, which worked)
cvs get -r atk
Building atk from cvs is broken for me but there is help (patching tools;) or simply use the prebuilt packages
cvs get -r gtk-2-6 gtk+
./autogen.sh --prefix=/gtk --with-gdktarget=win32
(without forciong the target you'll get complaints about Pango/X being required)
Now you should be able to run gtk-demo.
If not you should try
/gtk/bin/pango-querymodules > /gtk/etc/pango/pango.modules
and it finally works for me ;-) Because looking at gtk-demo is not that productive let's go for a real application
If nothing works as described you may want to try the gtk+/mingw build instructions from the real expert.

Need for Speed

Another way - and still my preferred - is to use the Micro$oft toolchain. This may be a little tedious cause sometimes the extra makefiles get out of sync. But with a little more manual work you can gain a lot of cpu cycles.

The build environment is described here. What you need is Visual C++ (preferably version 6.0, but 5.0 up to 7.1 are known to work [1]) There is nothing visual with the build environment, all is based on handwritten makefile.msc to be consumed by nmake -f makefile.msc. So at first you need to have the environment varibales set up.
```
D:\devel>VC98\bin\VCVARS32.BAT
Setting environment for using Microsoft Visual C++ tools.
```
Instead of detecting the dependency placement over and over again the msvc build uses a configuration file which the user needs to adapt once to his installation. The configuration also does not use "installed" versions of libs and headers but references the source directories where ever possible.
For GLib you need iconv and intl (getext) e.g. form the download page mentioned above. Also you probably need to update build/win32/module.defs and maybe build/win32/make.msc.
Pango has it's main makefile.msc in the pango sub-directory. The msvc build already does build included modules. So you can avoid most of the installation hassle described above. It almost builds out of the box and does not introduce extra dependencies - at least not if you don't want to build pango-ft2-2.0-0.dll
ATK did need some small modifications, but should now build out of the box for a while. And still no extra dependencies ;-)
GTK+ adds a bunch of extra dependencies: The most iportant one is libpng. Instead of using some GNU win32 variant lpng128.zip should do the trick. Some clicks later you should have libpng.lib and zlib.lib as static libraries. Usually I also want libjpeg. After with -MD added to CFLAGS in makefile.vc you'll produce a libjpeg.lib to be linked in gdk-pixbuf. Having these three libraries completely linked into libgdk_pixbuf-2.0-0.dll serves two purposes. For one it simplifies installation (just copy one dll). Additonaly it helps to avoid binary incompatibilities with some zlib.dll, libpng.dll lying around somewhere on your system. The latter is one of the more often reported crasher bugs with not only Dia.
Gdk - The Gimp Drawing Kit - provides the windowing abstraction. For tablet support it uses wintab. And above all that there is Gtk - the Gimp Tool Kit.

Still Not Enough?

The described dependencies are almost enough to compile Dia, which has some extra code to optionally not depend on freetype. But if you plan to build The GIMP there is some more required. At least you need Pango/FT2 which requires fontconfig and freetype2.

For me this was the point where I lost fun in building it all myself [2] ;) So go download freetype and fontconfig pre-built packages

Bloated or Rich of Features?

If you think current GTK+ is bloated you may want to take a look at gtk+1.3. Otherwise - especially if you think it's too fast and lloks ugly - you may be interested in the upcoming version.

[1] In general it is a bad idea to mix different C-ruintimes in one program. The official C-runtime for all of GTK+ is msvcrt.dll which came with vc 5.0 up to vc 6.0 and can be considered as part of the operating system.

[2] I've tried to explain the trouble which using two font engines in one program is. Also I tried to work around it one way or another but finally threre was too much resistance or maybe my reasons are just not convincing enough, i.e. noone cares for some extra seconds start-up time and even not about some random brokeness.