[mythtv] Building MythTV under Cygwin: Success!!! (is closer now)

[Andrei Tanas]

Hi all,
I've submitted a patch under new ticket #3470
(http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/3470).
The patch allows to build _working_ executables under cygwin. I'm in early
testing stages now, but so far:
 - everything builds (including filters etc)
 - backend works (it does not support video recording though)
 - frontend somewhat works (I was able to browse recordings, see recording
preview, but I could not start playback ("cannot set direct draw
cooperative level")
 - three plugins work: mythcontrols, mythvideo, mythgallery

The culprit for mythui crashing under cygwin was the undefined references.
Instead of masking them with -Wl,--noinhibit-exec they needed to be solved.
Windows dlls work differently from *nix dynamic libraries, a code that
imports a function needs to know exactly which library it's being imported
from (if there's a way to "teach" cygwin/gcc to do it differently, I would
like to know). The two main libs: myth and mythui refer each other, it was
a typical "chicken and egg" situation: there was no way to build one before
building another without having to ignore undefined references (which
ultimately led to segfaults). I had to create export definition file and
import library for libmythui to build libmyth and libmythtv, after that it
was fairly simple.

I am working with QT/X11 under cygwin. Apparently, this is not the best way
to do things, it would make so much more sense to use QT/Windows with no X
dependencies. I also think it could be the reason that DirectDraw
initialization fails. Someone mentioned something about using QT/Windows
libs built with mingw - can you give me some details?

Regards,
Andrei Tanas.