[Users] Claws Mail's Windows installer moving away from GPG4Win

Colin Leroy colin at colino.net
Sat Nov 10 11:10:44 CET 2012


Hello,

Most of you Windows users there know that Claws Mail's win32 packaging
has been done as part of the GPG4win project since a few years.

A little recurring problem I had when handling Claws Mail new Windows
builds is that often, GPG4win's had updated things between two builds
and I often had to fix stuff, which is a very tedious process for
Windows builds.
Also, it was a while since I wanted to have a more Claws-oriented
Windows package (and for the technical details, thought about adding a
special claws-mail target to GPG4win's Makefiles).

But recently, since GPG4win's repository includes the latest GLib, I
tried a lot to make a build succeed, but I never managed to. Be it with
Ubuntu 11.10, 12.04 or 12.10 I had cross-build toolchain issues that
ended up with an impossibility to build glib or even to
finish ./configure...
It took me way too much time and hassle for a port I only use
sporadically. I think I spent more than a week's worth of evenings
waiting for make to fail.

So, I took the easy route and forked the now-unmaintained GPG4win
SVN repository, the most recent version I could build, so I can
maintain it on claws-mail.org.

I've reworked the installer there to remove what you Claws Mail users
aren't interested in (like GPGol, the GPG Outlook Extension :-)), remove
some unneeded questions and some things like that, along with some
Claws branding in the installer :)

The end result is visible on http://www.claws-mail.org/win32/ and the
source can be either downloaded as a .exe or for people who want
to help - like ratinox - the easiest is to fetch it via Subversion on:

    http://svn.claws-mail.org/svn/claws/

Please note that I will probably not help building that installer, I
know how complicated, tedious and long it can be (although it can work
really easily especially when building on a Debian-based distro) and
don't feel like spending time debugging people's Windows builds.

I will continue updating GPG4win's package.current file when I'll
build newer versions of Claws Mail.

I hope this move will reach the two goals I have, help the users of
Claws Mail Windows version get the best-working package as possible, and
help me spend the less time possible pulling my hair out.

-- 
Colin
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