Are many packages in pkgsCross.mingwW64 just broken?

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1

I’m trying to get a basic cross compilation setup. I’ve read the cross compiling wiki. But the examples quickly break down. For example:

with import <nixpkgs> {
  crossSystem = {
    config = "x86_64-w64-mingw32";
  };
};

mkShell {
  buildInputs = [ fmt spdlog ];
}

spdlog fails with:

/build/source/tests/utils.cpp:4:14: fatal error: Windows.h: No such file or directory
    4 | #    include <Windows.h>
      |              ^~~~~~~~~~~

and fmt fails with:

/nix/store/ar3j35s4brxdda418xd48qzh3af6pggb-x86_64-w64-mingw32-binutils-2.39/bin/
x86_64-w64-mingw32-ld: CMakeFiles/os-test.dir/objects.a(os-test.cc.obj):os-test.cc:
(.rdata$.refptr._ZTVN3fmt2v77ostreamE[.refptr._ZTVN3fmt2v77ostreamE]+0x0): 
undefined reference to `vtable for fmt::v7::ostream'

Is this to be expected?

I think the spdlog failure could be fixed quite easily by patching that include to lowercase. But I wouldn’t know how to fix that fmt failure.

2

Are many package in pkgsCross.mingwW64 just broken?

I wouldn’t be surprised if this is generally true. In the last 2 years I can barely remember merging any mingw fixes.

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3

Thanks for confirming that I’m probably not doing anything wrong.

I also just found out that it is only fmt_7 which fails, fmt_8 and fmt_9 do compile without issues.

I guess I’ll open issues about this on GitHub and ping the maintainers.

4

You probably want to find some mingw maintainers instead because most maintainers will not know how to properly debug and fix this.

1 Like
5

Should mingw have separate maintainers? The spdlog package does list support for all platforms in its metadata. And the fix is simply to change Windows.h to windows.h. So I thought that would be in scope for the original maintainers.

6

No, I meant that for more hard fixes than that must maintainers can’t really help you to much because mingw is not that commonly used.

Also a package can totally list all platforms and only ever be tested on Linux. If it ends up being broken on a more obscure platform that is not run on hydra we usually don’t do to much about it.

And for that easy fix just send a PR and I’ll take a look at it. I would appreciate a command how to test it and we don’t necessarily need the approval of the maintainer for this.

1 Like