From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with archive (Exim 4.43) id 1MZPmA-0008Of-UK for mharc-grub-devel@gnu.org; Fri, 07 Aug 2009 09:46:30 -0400 Received: from mailman by lists.gnu.org with tmda-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1MZPmA-0008OU-1Y for grub-devel@gnu.org; Fri, 07 Aug 2009 09:46:30 -0400 Received: from exim by lists.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.43) id 1MZPm4-0008O9-GW for grub-devel@gnu.org; Fri, 07 Aug 2009 09:46:28 -0400 Received: from [199.232.76.173] (port=44871 helo=monty-python.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.43) id 1MZPm4-0008O6-Av for grub-devel@gnu.org; Fri, 07 Aug 2009 09:46:24 -0400 Received: from xvm-190-8.ghst.net ([217.70.190.8]:49074 helo=aybabtu.com) by monty-python.gnu.org with esmtps (TLS-1.0:RSA_AES_256_CBC_SHA1:32) (Exim 4.60) (envelope-from ) id 1MZPm2-0007zs-33; Fri, 07 Aug 2009 09:46:22 -0400 Received: from [192.168.10.10] (helo=thorin) by aybabtu.com with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1MZPlv-0005fN-FX; Fri, 07 Aug 2009 15:46:15 +0200 Received: from rmh by thorin with local (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1MZPlu-0002Hw-Mq; Fri, 07 Aug 2009 15:46:14 +0200 Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2009 15:46:14 +0200 From: Robert Millan To: grub-devel@gnu.org Bcc: "Yoshinori K. Okuji" , Marco Gerards , Pavel Roskin Message-ID: <20090807134614.GA8719@thorin> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline Organization: free as in freedom X-Message-Flag: Worried about Outlook viruses? Switch to Thunderbird! www.mozilla.com/thunderbird X-Debbugs-No-Ack: true User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.18 (2008-05-17) X-detected-operating-system: by monty-python.gnu.org: GNU/Linux 2.6 (newer, 3) Subject: Solving the grub-pe2elf problem X-BeenThere: grub-devel@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list Reply-To: The development of GRUB 2 List-Id: The development of GRUB 2 List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 07 Aug 2009 13:46:30 -0000 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."