Sir Gallantmon skrev:
Sorry, I think of the word "toolchain" differently I guess. I always considered a toolchain to include both tools and common libraries, as Fedora did. I was aware of the MinGW compiler offered in the Debian package repository, but with no libraries, I considered it useless.
Well, to be fair, the libraries included with mingw32 include the whole Win32 API, including the standard C runtime (msvcrt). What more could you possibly need from a "minimalist GNU for Windows" compiler for it to be useful...?
I think, though, that Debian decided not to bloat the Debian archive with precompiled third-party libraries for mingw. They prefer to bloat it only with packages built for the supported Debian architectures. Cross compilers (like mingw) are often included since they need to run on the host, but extra libraries for the non-native architecture usually aren't, you may need to compile stuff like that yourself (or use stuff like apt-cross/dpkg-cross if possible, but they may not apply to mingw).
Can be a bit of a pain, though, yes... but maybe, once they've finally gotten multiarch up and running (planned for years and probably due to occur sometime before the heat death of the universe), it'll be easier and cleaner to deal with cross-compilation (and emulation) environments.
I think I may be able to deal with it for now though. Even the current situation is less hassle than ever having to touch rpm... or even worse, Fedora...