Re: building xwin packages

[Harold L Hunt <huntharo at msu dot edu>]

Nicholas,

Building the XFree86 packages for Cygwin is not for the faint of heart.  It
takes possibly many hours (especially for first timers) and there is a lot
that can go wrong.  With that in mind, I'll point you to two of the three
steps for building the packages, and I'll post the packaging script tonight
when I am on the machine that has it.  I had posted the script before but the
machine it was on is no longer accessible, so I'll have to put it somewhere
else.  Be aware that you can start the first two steps and by the time that I
post the packaging script in about 8 hours you still won't have built
XFree86...

1) Follow the instructions in the Cygwin/XFree86 Contributor's Guide for
downloading the source for XFree86 and building it.  You'll want to grab the
`xf-4_2-branch' of the source code.  I think you would do that with:

cvs checkout -r xf-4_2-branch xc

Notice that some of the patches to the latest Xxserv package were not applied
to the xf-4_2-branch (I don't think Alan keeps an xf-4_2-branch tree around)
so you'll need to grab the default branch and copy the files from
xc/programs/Xserver/hw/xwin/ into your 4_2 tree.

The relevant steps in the Contributor's Guide are here:

http://xfree86.cygwin.com/docs/cg/prog-build-native.html


2) After building XFree86 you'll need to create the XFree86 packages, which is
very difficult.  I've attempted to create a Cygwin-specific version of the
instructions for this at:

http://xfree86.cygwin.com/docs/cg/prog-distribution.html


3) Now you need to convert the XFree86 packages into Cygwin packages.  This is
done with the build.sh script that Ian Burrell wrote and I modified.  I'll
post this later tonight, but the basic idea is that you copy the XFree86
packages into a directory with build.sh, then run the script.  It takes about
5 to 10 minutes on my 1200 Athlon with a pretty quick hard drive, so I
wouldn't be surprised if it took up to an hour on older hardware.


You'd better be really sure that you actually want to do this before you put
any time into it.  There is a reason that XFree86 was not installable via
Cygwin's setup.exe for almost a year after we started using the XFree86
packaging script.


Good luck,

Harold

Nicholas Wourms <nwourms@yahoo.com> said:

> Harold,
> 
> How do you build the packages for use with setup.exe?  Do you use a script
> or do you do it by hand?  If it is a script, would you post it please? 
> The reason I ask is because I want to recompile X and add it to my local
> install directory with upset.  Thanks in advance!
> 
> Cheers,
> Nicholas
> 
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