Building glibmm on Win32
===========================

Currently, both the mingw (native win32) gcc compiler and MS Visual
Studio 2015 and later are supported. glibmm can be built with
mingw32-gcc using the gnu autotools (automake, autoconf, libtool).
As explicitly stated in the gtk+ for win32 distribution
(http://www.gimp.org/win32/), the gcc compiler provided by the cygwin
distribution should not be used to build glib/glibmm libraries and/or
applications (see the README.win32 that comes with the gtk+ DLLs).
This MIGHT cause conflicts between the cygwin and msvcrt runtime
environments.

1. Mingw

The mingw distribution which has been tested with this release is the
following :

* MinGW-4.1 as the base distribution.

The bare mingw distribution does not provide the necessary tools (sh, perl, m4
, autoconf, automake, ..) to run the provided configure script "as is". One
(currently non supported) solution is to use mingw in conjunction with msys,
which is readily available on the mingw website (http://www.mingw.org/).

The preferred method is to combine the cygwin distribution (for the unix tools
that were mentioned above) with mingw by making sure that the mingw
tools (gcc, ld, dlltool, ..) are called first.

First, make sure that you have working distribution of the native port
of both libsigc++-2.10.x and glib-2.0 on win32 (see
http://www.gimp.org/win32). If you can't compile a simple glib example
using gcc and `pkg-config --cflags --libs`, you should not even think
about trying to compile glibmm, let alone using precompiled libglibmm
DLLs to port your glibmm application !

The configure script can then be called using (as an example) the
following options

./configure --prefix=/target --build=i386-pc-mingw32 --disable-static

then

make
make check
make install

2. MS Visual Studio 2015~2019

In a Visual Studio command prompt, navigate to the MSVC_NMake directory.
Run 'nmake /f Makefile.vc CFG=[release|debug]' to build the glibmm and
giomm DLLs, along with their example programs.  If a prefix other than
$(srcroot)\..\vs$(VSVER)\$(Platform) is desired, pass in PREFIX=$(your_prefix)
in the NMake command line.  In order to build the giomm settings example
program, the glib-compile-schemas needs to reside in $(PREFIX)\bin, or
it must be specified via passing in GLIB_COMPILE_SCHEMAS.  If you are using
C++ dependencies that are built with Meson, specify USE_MESON_LIBS=1 in
your NMake command line.

Note that $(VSVER) refers to 14 for Visual Studio 2015 and 15 for Visual
Studio 2017 and 16 for Visual Studio 2019.  Note that it is recommended
and possibly required to build glibmm and anything that depends on glibmm
with the same Visual Studio version, even for Visual Studio 2015, 2017 and
2019 which Microsoft tried very hard to make the binaries API and ABI
compatible between these versions, so now the build creates different
DLL and .lib filenames to make this distinction clear.  If you have
previously built glibmm with Visual Studio 2017 or 2019 and had DLL and
.lib filenames in the form of xxx-vc140(-d)-y_z, you may choose to pass
`USE_COMPAT_LIBS=1` in your NMake build commandline to continue to build
with the resulting DLL and .lib names be in the former form, but please
note that this is not recommended unless rebuilding dependent code is
not convenient.  For the Meson builds, pass in the option
'-Dmsvc14x-parallel-installable=false' to the Meson configure command line
to avoid having the toolset version in the final DLL and .lib filenames;
again, this is only recommended if it is inconvenient to re-build the
dependent code.

A 'tests' target will build the test programs for glibmm and giomm, an
'install' target is provided to copy the built DLLs and LIBs, along with
with the public headers to appropriate subdirs of $(PREFIX).  A 'clean'
target is also provided to remove all the built files.

The NMake Makefiles now support building the glibmm libraries directly from a GIT checkout
with a few manual steps required, namely to:

-Ensure that you have a copy of Cygwin or MSYS/MSYS64 installed, including
 m4.exe and sh.exe.  You should also have a PERL for Windows installation
 as well, and your PATH should contain the paths to your PERL interpreter
 and the bin\ directory of your Cygwin or MSYS/MSYS64 installation, and
 it is recommended that these paths are towards the end of your PATH.  You need
 to install the XML::Parser PERL module as well, which requires libexpat.

-Make a new copy of the entire source tree to some location, where the build
 is to be done; then in $(srcroot)\MSVC_NMake run
 nmake /f Makefile.vc CFG=[release|debug], which will first copy and generate
 the following files with the proper info (this step will also be run if the following
 files are not present in the unpacked source tarball):
 --$(srcroot)\MSVC_NMake\glibmm\glibmmconfig.h
 --$(srcroot)\MSVC_NMake\giomm\giommconfig.h
 --$(srcroot)\MSVC_NMake\glibmm\glibmm.rc
 --$(srcroot)\MSVC_NMake\giomm\giomm.rc
 --$(srcroot)\tools\gmmproc
 --$(srcroot)\tools\generate_wrap_init.pl

After copying the above 6 files, you need to ensure that they reflect on the package version
that best matches your checkout status and the paths in $(srcroot)\tools\gmmproc and
$(srcroot)\tools\generate_wrap_init.pl (the items enclosed between the @...@'s) should reflect
on where you intend for nmake /f Makefile.vc CFG=$(CFG) install to install to (i.e. $(PREFIX)).
For giommconfig.h, it is recommended to keep GIOMM_STATIC_LIB and GIOMM_DISABLE_DEPRECATED
undefined unless you know what you are doing (remember, the NMake Makefiles only support DLL
builds out-of-the-box).  For builds from the release tarballs, running
nmake /f Makefile.vc CFG=[release|debug] gen-perl-scripts-real will also generate
$(srcroot)\tools\gmmproc and $(srcroot)\tools\generate_wrap_init.pl for you.

Note that to generate any of the above 6 files, a PERL installation is also required.


3. Glibmm methods and signals not available on win32

All glibmm methods and signals are available on win32.

