[Privoxy-devel] Improving Privoxy packages for Windows (was: Release date for Privoxy 3.0.29)

[Lee]

On 12/12/20, Fabian Keil <fk at fabiankeil.de> wrote:
> Fabian Keil <fk at fabiankeil.de> wrote on 2020-11-19:
>
>> Lee <ler762 at gmail.com> wrote on 2020-11-18:
>
>> > A new release with TLS interception enabled - I need help with how to
>> > enable brotli decompression, how to include openssl libraries etc. &
>> > which version of software to use.
>>
>> Maybe we should take the opportunity to rethink the whole
>> build workflow for Windows. I don't think we should delay the
>> release for this, though.
>>
>> It would be great if future Privoxy binaries for Windows would
>> use a recent and dynamically-linked pcre version so we can finally
>> ditch the obsolete pcre copy in git (TODO item #142).
>>
>> Once we have figured out how to ship Brotli and MbedTLS
>> libraries adding another one is probably trivial.

I probably could have done better with the wording of my original message.
I don't have a problem with shipping the libraries; building & linking
them with Privoxy is where I fall down :(  If you recall, you had to
help me with how to link privoxy with mbedtls.

>> We can't use OpenSSL on Windows because the "special exception"
>> from section 3 of the GPLv2 does not apply.

Not that it's ready for use, but how about OpenSSL v3?
https://www.openssl.org/source/license.html
  For the 3.0.0 release, and later releases derived from that, the
Apache License v2 applies. This also applies to the git "master"
branch.

>> Many other free software projects cross-compile for Windows:
>> https://www.gpg4win.org/build-installer-gnulinux.html
>> https://gitweb.torproject.org/builders/tor-browser-build.git/tree/README
>> https://wiki.videolan.org/Win32Compile/
>>
>> Maybe we should do this as well.
>
> Through the Emacs website I cam across MSYS2 today:
> https://www.msys2.org/
>
> It seems to be a packaging system based on pacman (used by Arch Linux)
> and they already package Brotli, pcre and MbedTLS:
> https://packages.msys2.org/base
>
> Maybe we should try to get Privoxy into the MSYS2 distribution.

I can give it a try.

> They don't seem to support older Windows versions but for
> recent Windows versions it may be a good fit.

Microsoft doesn't support older Windows versions, so I don't see that
as a problem.

Lee