Extend action to support Ubuntu runner?

[stweil]

It might sound strange, but the msys packages work nice for cross builds (targetting 32 or 64 bit Windows) on Debian / Ubuntu hosts, too. Typically a cross build on Linux is much faster than a build on Windows. While Debian and Debian based Linux distributions provide compiler packages for the cross build, they lack the required library packages. msys comes with a large collection of packages which can fill the gap. Therefore it would be great if the GitHub action could be used with the Ubuntu 22.04 runner, too.

[lazka]

MSYS2 doesn't support running on Ubuntu, so this is nothing the github action can provide.

[stweil]

I'd expect that the action provides pacman and pacman settings, so it is possible to install msys packages for mingw32, mingw64, ...

[lazka]

I see. The install scripts and hooks would require something like wine though, or you somehow patch them out.

[stweil]

I simply ignore the error messages from the install hooks. Typically that works fine (at least for my builds, QEMU and Tesseract OCR).

[MehdiChinoune]

Typically a cross build on Linux is much faster than a build on Windows.

Are you using autotools, then that's expected. Use CMake or meson for a better buildsystem and faster build-time.

[lazka]

I could see someone providing a docker image based on Ubuntu as a first step (or Fedora, since they have a ucrt cross compiler toolchain)

[stweil]

Yes, Fedora has a more complete selection of library packages for cross builds.