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Building MyPaint on Windows

NOTE: THIS STYLE OF BUILD IS NOT YET READY FOR GENERAL DISTRIBUTION

This document describes building a native Win32 MyPaint using MSYS2's MinGW-w64. The resultant script and its extension DLL must be run using the native Python which built it, and running it depends on external libs like GTK3 which reside in the native /mingw32 tree. The only supported method for running MyPaint with these instructions is from the

This doc DOES NOT COVER building MyPaint as a single .exe, or into any form of installer. That is a thing we want to do eventually, and we'd be happy to accept patches and new build procedures which make it happen; however this document currently covers only the bare essentials needed to get MyPaint running for debugging purposes.

In other words, the build created with these instructions compiles, but the program isn't usable yet. If you're curious however, read on.

Get and update MSYS2

MSYS2 is a free toolchain, build environment, and binary library distribution for Windows. It can create native PE32 binaries for Windows using MinGW-w64. We'll be building for its "MINGW32" target.

At the time of writing, NumPy on native Win64 is not considered stable enough for production when compiled with MinGW. It emits several warnings when used, so we'll give it a miss this time round.

Follow the instructions at either

to get started. The docs below use msys2-x86_64-20141113.exe as their starting point.

One installed, update MSYS2:

pacman -Sy
pacman --needed -S bash pacman msys2-runtime
; then close and reopen the shell
pacman -Su
; restart shell again

The commands above can be run in any shell shipping with MSYS2, but the build commands below must be run in the "MinGW-w64 Win32 Shell".

Developer tools

Install the target-independent developer tools needed for the build, and git for fetching the source. The latter is not needed if you're building a tarball or have retreived the MyPaint code in some other way.

pacman -S base-devel git

For compiling MyPaint, we'll need a target-specific build toolchain and pkg-config utility. The instructions below assume the i686 target, i.e. a 32-bit build. You can substitute x86_64 if you want a 64-bit build, but be aware that 64-bit MinGW builds for Windows more experimental.

pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-toolchain mingw-w64-i686-pkg-config

Install MyPaint dependencies

All of MyPaint's dependencies are available from the MSYS2 repositories. Thanks to everyone maintaining MINGW-packages for giving us a great open platform to build against!

pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-gtk3 \
  mingw-w64-i686-json-c \
  mingw-w64-i686-lcms2 \
  mingw-w64-i686-python2-cairo \
  mingw-w64-i686-pygobject-devel \
  mingw-w64-i686-python2-gobject \
  mingw-w64-i686-python2-numpy \
  mingw-w64-i686-hicolor-icon-theme \
  mingw-w64-i686-librsvg

Make sure that GdkPixbuf's loaders.cache gets regenerated for librsvg so that MyPaint will be able to load its symbolic icons. The quickest way is to force a reinstall of the package:

pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-gdk-pixbuf2

but you can regenerate it with gdk-pixbuf-query-loaders.exe too.

Build and test MyPaint

Unfortunately, base-devel's version of SCons seems ignorant of MINGW32 tools and prefixes at version 2.3.4-2. We don't have a workaround which would let us use that scons yet, but the quickest fix is to use SCons-local with the native build of Python2 which should already be installed into /mingw32. SCons-local can be downloaded from http://scons.org/download.php, or just do.

pacman -S wget
cd /usr/src
wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/scons/scons-local-2.3.4.tar.gz
mkdir -p scons-local
tar xzf scons-local-2.3.4.tar.gz -C scons-local

Once that's done, fetch and build MyPaint itself. You need to do this from the MINGW32 environment.

cd /usr/src
git clone https://github.com/mypaint/mypaint.git
cd mypaint
git submodule update --init
MSYSTEM= ../scons-local/scons.py

Note the need to unset MSYSTEM when SCons runs. The Python we'll be using has some oddities with path separators which make this necessary.

Hopefully after this, MyPaint can be run from the location you pulled it down to:

./mypaint -c /tmp/cfgtmp1

At the time of writing however, MyPaint is fairly riddled with showstopper bugs on Win32. But at least now we can work on those.

Known Problems

  • No pressure support / glitches with tablet drivers. One possible cause of this is being actively worked on: it seems to be a GDK bug relating to WinTab initialization. See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=743330

  • Bugs. Huge numbers of them. The port to Windows has historically received the least love of all MyPaint ports, but this document is intended to help address that. We really need actively testing users to improve matters. Please report problems as described in CONTRIBUTING.md.

  • No standardized pre-packaging. One will be needed before this build can be distributed in any form which is meaningful to ordinary people. A possible starting point is http://www.scons.org/doc/HTML/scons-man.html#b-Package.