Building gtkmm on Win32

===========================

Currently, both the mingw (native win32) gcc compiler and MS Visual

Studio 2005 are supported. gtkmm 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 gtk+/gtkmm 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++-2.0.x and gtk+-2.0 on win32 (see

http://www.gimp.org/win32). If you can't compile a simple gtk+ example

using gcc and `pkg-config --cflags --libs`, you should not even think

about trying to compile gtkmm, let alone using precompiled libgtkmm

DLLs to port your gtkmm 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 2005

Open the gtkmm.sln solution file in the MSVC_Net2003 directory. In

the Tools/Options panel, add the appropriate GTK+, glibmm include and lib

directories to the Projects and Solutions/VC++ directories. Build the

solution. 

Important NOTE : to circumvent the C++ compiler bug described in this

bugzilla entry (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=158040), it

is necessary to add '/vd2' to the list of compiler options when

building and/or using gtkmm with Visual Studio 2005. 

gtkmm-2.8 will probably not work correctly with Visual Studio 7.1 or

below because of the aforementioned bug.

3. Gtkmm methods and signals not available on win32

All gtkmm methods and signals are available on win32.

4. Gtkmm examples and demos on win32

All demos and examples compile/run on win32