[Development] Dropping MinGW support in Qt 6 (Was: HEADS-UP: QStringLiteral)

[Ray Donnelly]

On Thu, 22 Aug 2019, 00:01 Thiago Macieira, <thiago.macieira at intel.com>
wrote:

> On Wednesday, 21 August 2019 13:39:55 PDT Kai Pastor, DG0YT wrote:
> > Note that this is the MSYS subsystem, not a MinGW subsystem of MSYS2.
> > For building Windows applications, you use a MinGW subsystem, and there
> > is no msys-2.0.dll.
>
> That's just MinGW, albeit the build from MSYS2. If that's what was meant,
> I'm
> all for it. After the upgrade I've just run, I have GCC 9.2, which is
> great.
>

It is not MinGW,v it is a mingw-w64 based, developer focused build system.
The POSIX software we provide exists only to support this goal. To be clear
we refuse to add packages to the msys2 subsystem package set if they are
not either in support of building native software or in support of making
life easier for developers of the same.

We (along with conda-forge though both independently) are also leading the
charge to get clang into a working state on windows.

You can see the patches we apply and it recipe at
https://github.com/msys2/MINGW-packages/tree/master/mingw-w64-qt5

I find it depressing quite frankly that you know so little about it given
your position. MSYS2 grew out of the old QtBuilds and mingw-builds projects
(same initial developers). We also decided from the beginning to use dw2
exceptions based on your recommendation. This was many years ago. Try it
you might like it. The initial runtime update thing is unfortunate, we link
our pacman as statically as we can but it's not possible to statically link
the runtime. MSYS2 has also been adopted as the upstream env for Git for
Windows so mostly everyone using git on windows is running MSYS2 software
even if they do not know it. Also most of the old game system and computer
emulation world are based on MSYS2. I could do on but I will not. It is the
greatest gift to software packaging on windows yet to be created IMNSHO (I
am very proud of our success here) though for scientific computing
conda-forge is often more appropriate. We also produce builds - MSVC based,
but considering clang as the compiler in the future - of qt at conda-forge
(I help maintain the recipes). Those patches can be found at
https://github.com/conda-forge/qt-feedstock/tree/master/recipe

I would love to upstream what I can from these endeavors but my time is
short (in a very real, serious sense). I'd love to work closely with a few
core developers to unload this patch burden from both before I cannot
anymore.

>
> But I had understood the proposal as linking to MSYS2 libraries.
>

You should always assume that native software is being discussed when
people mention MSYS2 in this way.


> --
> Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
>   Software Architect - Intel System Software Products
>
>
>
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