[Gretl-devel] Building gretl on WSL (Windows subsystem for Linux)

Hi, I've read about the support that Windows 10 (64bit only I think) offers to run Linux non-graphical programs. Today I tested successfully that it is possible to build the Linux version of gretl from source on Windows 10 like this: 1) Install WSL as per Microsoft's instructions (https://docs.microsoft.com/de-de/windows/wsl/install-win10). This is quick, but reboot required. 2) Download and install a Linux distro in the format suitable for WSL. I used Debian (stretch) from here: https://aka.ms/wsl-debian-gnulinux, but on the page https://docs.microsoft.com/de-de/windows/wsl/install-manual there are also other links. 3) Inside this Debian quasi-install, edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file to add to the existing lines the corresponding source entries starting with deb-src. 4) Do "sudo apt build-dep gretl", which then takes almost 1GB of disk space. 5) Download the gretl source archive, for example with wget. (Remember the whole thing is command-line only, not GUI programs are possible.) 6) Unpack it with "tar xf gretl<.....>xz" 7) Go into this new directory and do "./configure" and then "make" as usual. This worked for me without errors. Of course it's not really necessary to cross-compile a Linux build on Windows. But perhaps it would also be possible to use this Linux subsystem to compile for the Windows target platform. Then this method could replace the MinGW/Msys way of doing it. (Following Allin's instruction in the past I was also able to build on Windows with MinGW, but I believe with the WSL it might be easier.) FWIW, sven