Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional comments should be made in the comments box of this bug. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=467260 --- Comment #5 from Richard W.M. Jones <rjones@xxxxxxxxxx> 2008-10-17 18:40:37 EDT --- Basically, what Daniel said in comment 4. I'll explain it in slightly different terms:- Let's say we build zlib (bug 454416). When we run our find-requires script as part of rpmbuild, they will find the list of DLLs which zlib1.dll depends on. In the particular case of zlib, it's KERNEL32.dll & msvcrt.dll. These are in the "normal" case proprietary, non-free Windows binaries. So the question arises, how did we build zlib1.dll given that we don't have these proprietary libraries around? We built them from the w32api package, which is a Public Domain set of header files that duplicate the headers found in Windows dev kits, and provide stubs. As Dan explained, Windows DLLs really come in two parts - the library of functions itself and a set of stub routines that you link to the caller. In w32api the stubs are in %{_mingw32_libdir}/libkernel32.a, which is compiled from public domain source by our open source gcc/binutils toolchain.[*] We want to be able to build & install mingw32-zlib without necessarily needing to install wine. (And certainly not needing to install Windows!) There is no requirement to have wine installed in order to use the mingw toolchain to develop software (ie. to compile more stuff on top of it), so why require that? So for expediency, this base package "provides" the "missing" DLLs. Another way to do it would be to exclude these proprietary DLLs in our find-requires checking script - essentially it comes out the same either way. [*] If it sounds like I'm over-emphasizing the completely free / open source nature of this, then I am. People don't believe that this can be built from 100% Free (as in speech) software, but it is. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug. _______________________________________________ Fedora-package-review mailing list Fedora-package-review@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-package-review