Bug#602997: ITP: gcc-mingw-w64 -- The GNU Compiler Collection for MinGW-w64

[Stephen Kitt <steve@sk2.org>]

Hi Matthias,

On Sun, Nov 14, 2010 at 09:13:58PM +0100, Matthias Klose wrote:
> On 10.11.2010 08:32, Stephen Kitt wrote:
> >Package: wnpp
> >Severity: wishlist
> >Owner: Stephen Kitt<steve@sk2.org>
> >
> >
> >* Package name    : gcc-mingw-w64
> 
> we already have a mingw32 toolchain. Is it possible to build a mingw
> biarch toolchain instead of a new package?

MinGW32 and MinGW-w64 are actually two different toolchains, not
simply bi-arch variants of the same toolchain; they have different
triplets. (In fact given the way ldscripts are shipped they would
probably have to conflict with each other.) MinGW-w64 provides both
32-bit and 64-bit toolchains, and builds some 32-bit software (such as
Wine Gecko) which the current mingw32 toolchain can't - that is in
fact why Ove Kaaven was interested in Robert Millan's gcc-mingw32
package and associated packages which were actually based on MinGW-w64
rather than MinGW32, and why I started work on packaging the whole
toolchain.

My aim with the mingw-w64 toolchain is two-fold:

* provide a proper MinGW-w64 toolchain, handling the varied
  requirements of the potential users in Debian, notably wine-gecko
  and potentially wine-mono;
* avoid the confusion which exists regarding mingw32 and gcc-mingw32.

I'm currently discussing the situation with Ron, the maintainer of the
mingw32 toolchain. Our intention is ideally to establish whether one
of the two toolchains can handle the various requirements, in which
case only that one would be kept.

Note that for now MinGW (the new name for MinGW32) doesn't support
64-bit targets; that support is supposed to be forthcoming. A bigger
problem is that recent releases of MinGW only support Windows-hosted
compilers, as I understand things at least.

> the toolchain currently builds for arch `any'. Is this really
> necessary?  Maybe it's fine to to prove that this is buildable on
> arm or mips, but is it really used?

Probably not, i386 and amd64 would be perfectly sufficient.

Thanks for your interest,

Stephen