[cairo] cairo windows development setup?

[Tor Lillqvist]

Stuart Parmenter writes:
 > Visual Studio 2005.  gdb just doesn't cut it for doing any real debugging...

I use plain gcc and GNU binutils, i.e. "mingw" (www.mingw.org) to
build cairo. But I certainly admit Visual Studio's debugger is
nice. gdb is a bit plain, and the version I happen to have even has
the irritating bug that it prints out lots of irrelevant internal
debugging crap;) But then I really don't do much debugging of cairo on
Windows. (For my GTK+ and GIMP hacking I also use mingw, and there I
do some more debugging, and then gdb can really be a pain.)

The advantage of using GNU tools for complexy things like the GTK+
stack, GIMP, GNOME libraries etc is that you don't have to maintain a
parallel build infrastructure, but use the same configury and
Makefile.am as on POSIX.

For cairo, which after all is a quite simple library source-code-
structure-wise, with just two folders of source files, just listing
them into Visual Studio to set up a project, solution, or whatever
they call it this week, is not a problem.

For my "real work" on OO.o I do use Visual Studio (2003). (OO.o's
build system uses just a Make clone and the command-line compiler but
oh yes, for debugging, I love the IDE debugger.)

Avoid Cygwin because then unless you are extremely careful, pay
attention, and know what you are doing it is easy to get into a
confused state where you think you are building cairo for Win32
(i.e. no POSIX emulation involved) but then for instance you use
Cygwin's freetype headers and libraries. Or something like that.

--tml