Solving the grub-pe2elf problem

[Robert Millan <rmh@aybabtu.com>]

Hi,

I thought of a possible solution to the grub-pe2elf problem.  It seems that
it is burdensome to produce ELF binaries on Windows, but building PE binaries
or even PE/win32 executables on GNU/Linux is not (thanks to Mingw32 toolchain
which is available on most distributions).

If building GRUB with "./configure --host=i586-mingw32msvc" works, we could
include win32 binaries in the upcoming 1.97 release.  Other GNU projects do
this as well.  Then we could drop support for toolchains that lack ELF.

It probably doesn't currently build this way, because win32 won't have all
the functions we need, but this can be fixed by importing them from Gnulib,
the GNU compatibility library.

Christian and Bean, are you interested in implementing this?

Other maintainers, is it burdensome to any of you to include these binaries
in official builds?  I suppose it's not, since mingw32 packages are widely
available, but it doesn't hurt to ask :-)

-- 
Robert Millan

  The DRM opt-in fallacy: "Your data belongs to us. We will decide when (and
  how) you may access your data; but nobody's threatening your freedom: we
  still allow you to remove your data and not access it at all."