OCaml + Windows cross-compilation (code from the short talk today)

[Richard Jones <rich@annexia.org>]

The code is here:

http://www.annexia.org/tmp/ocaml-mingw-gtk

The README from the tarball is also attached below.

Rich.

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This tarball / directory contains an example of cross-compiling OCaml
LablGtk programs for Windows, which I originally demonstrated at the
OCaml Users Conference meeting Feb 2009.

You will need to start here:

  http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW

It's a good idea to join the Fedora MinGW mailing list (mentioned on
the above page), and if you have any problems post them on the mailing
list.

	 	-   -   -

You must install Fedora 10 which you will need to upgrade to Fedora
Rawhide (the development version):

  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/Rawhide

If you don't have Fedora Rawhide already, try installing it in a
virtual machine.

OCaml cross-compilation is _not_ supported on RHEL, EPEL, CentOS,
Fedora <= 10, etc at this time, although we may add these
distributions in future.

The software required is partially in Rawhide and partially in a
separate repository.  Create and edit a file /etc/yum.repos.d/mingw.repo
containing:

  [mingw]
  name=MinGW
  baseurl=http://www.annexia.org/tmp/mingw/fedora-rawhide/x86_64
  enabled=1
  gpgcheck=0

Replace "x86_64" with "i386" if you have a 32 bit machine.  We do not
compile the temporary repository for non-x86 architectures at this
time.

Now install the packages and their deps by typing this command (as
root):

  yum install \
     ocaml ocaml-x11 ocaml-findlib-devel \
     mingw32-gcc \
     mingw32-ocaml mingw32-ocaml-findlib mingw32-ocaml-lablgtk2 \
     mingw32-nsis mingw32-nsiswrapper \
     wine autoconf automake

You should now be able to compile the Windows demo by doing:

  mingw32-configure
  make

and then run/test it in Wine by doing:

  wine gtk_test.exe

To compile the Windows installer you will first need to install the
program (this is an arcane requirement which will be fixed in future).
As root do:

  make install

Then as a normal user do:

  make installer.exe

Copy installer.exe to a Windows machine to try it.

     		   -   -   -

Developers: The only files you need to copy in order to create an
autotools package are 'configure.ac' and 'Makefile.am'.  After copying
these to a new directory, run:

  autoreconf -i

(You may need to create empty files 'README', 'NEWS' etc. as
instructed).

     		   -   -   -

For questions/problems please join the Fedora MinGW mailing list.

    		       	      	   - Richard Jones, Feb 2009


-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat