CMake-based MinGW-w64 Cross Toolchain

This thing’s primary use is to build Windows binaries of mpv.

Prerequisites

Warning

As a general rule, make sure your stuff is recent. I don’t want to hear any complaints about stuff not building on outdated systems.

In addition to CMake, you need the usual development stuff (Git, Subversion, GCC, Binutils, headers for GMP, MPFR and MPC) as well as some things required by the packages you want to build, like glib-genmarshal for glib, gtkdocize for harfbuzz, and probably others.

Note

You should also install Ninja and use CMake’s Ninja build file generator. It’s not only much faster than GNU Make, but also far less error-prone, which is important for this project because CMake’s ExternalProject module tends to generate makefiles which confuse GNU Make’s jobserver thingy.

Building Software

To set up the build environment, create a directory to store build files in:

mkdir build-64
cd build-64

Once you’ve changed into that directory, run CMake, e.g.:

cmake -DTARGET_ARCH=x86_64-w64-mingw32 -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=../prefix-64 -DMAKEJOBS=2 -G Ninja ..

Once that’s done, you’re ready to build stuff. For example, to build mpv and all of its dependencies:

ninja mpv

This will take a while (about 20 minutes on my machine).

Note

The mpv package has some additional steps to generate a 7zip archive ready for distribution instead of installing it to the prefix.

Unpackaged Stuff

Using the toolchain to build stuff which doesn’t have a package is usually very easy. There are two generated files in your build directory to help with this: “exec” and “toolchain.cmake”.

For most software (i.e. almost everything that uses GNU Autotools), you can use “exec” with the configure command:

~/mingw/build-64/exec ./configure --prefix=~/mingw/prefix-64/mingw --host=x86_64-w64-mingw32

An alternative is to run “source ~/mingw/build-64/exec” to set all the required environment variables in your current session.

For software that uses CMake, you can use “toolchain.cmake” like this:

cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=~/mingw/build-64/toolchain.cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=~/mingw/prefix-64/mingw

In general, it is advisable to use static linking when building for Windows. To do that, use --disable-shared and/or --enable-static with Autotools-based configure scripts.

CMake doesn’t have a standard way to achieve this, so you’re on your own.

Note

It’s usually easy to make CMake projects link statically if they don’t have an option for it already. If you need an example, look at the patches for game-music-emu.

Creating Packages

To add a new package, create a new .cmake file in the packages directory (just look at how the existing packages work) and add it to the list in packages/CMakeLists.txt (they must appear after their dependencies).

See the CMake documentation on the ExternalProject module for further info.