I finally got wxWidgets to compile on Windows with gdiplus using MinGW. I didn't realise GCC actually looks for libs in a completely different way to MSVC. Had to copy over and edit some headers from the MS platform SDK, since MinGW doesn't come with gdiplus yet.
I don't know what the legal position would be on packaging up the files with the edits I made and making them available for download. The originals are freely available in SDKs from download.microsoft.com... anyone have any advice on this?
I've also read through the majority of perlxstut. I actually spent a long time looking for anything saying explicitly how to use external libraries; all the examples in perldoc I looked at were based on making one's own .c/.h files. Fair enough, it turned out to be delightfully simple, but these things are only obvious when you know the answer (thanks to Zaxo for revealing the elegant truth).
I've also been examining the wxWebKit headers and example program, along with the documentation on the wxWebKit site. It looks fairly manageable. I'd hope to have a demo working within a couple of days (although I'm going to my graduation this week so won't get to work on until the weekend).
The part that still seems tricky is setting everything up to install automatically, like the Alien::wxWidgets currently does. The wxWebKit source is currently hosted at gitorious.org, so I don't know if LWP will be able to pull it down from there easily. I can worry about that later though.
What we do with Perl::Dist (the toolkit we use to build Strawberry) is to avoid pulling from the original sources entirely (since they are far too unreliable).
Instead, we download the tarballs to a known-good location (I use http://strawberryperl.com/packages/) and then the Alien/etc module hardcodes in that path instead.
Since you aren't modifying the tarball, there should be no legal problems.
Re:Easy solution to the distribution thing
doubi on 2009-08-07T03:00:15
I wouldn't be modifying the WebKit tarball, but I did modify the Microsoft gdiplus headers. That would probably make them a no-go for making available elsewhere; I suppose the best I could do would be a script to apply my changes to a set downloaded from the MS site.
gdiplus is only needed for compiling with wxGraphicsContext though, which isn't actually required (as I'd thought), wxDC will do. I'll probably try putting a WebKit tarball up somewhere, depending on what it look like when the build system changes in the next week or so.
