Skip to content

Enable Visual Studio variant by default on Windows, including for build tools

MSVC CI has been broken for a few days now while building cargo-c. At first this was happening randomly, but now it is very consistent. There has been some breakage in build.rs in some cargo-c dependencies (because we do not lock it down with a Cargo.lock unlike gst-plugins-rs; maybe we should) which is causing libz-sys, libssh-sys, and other crates to build C code with the wrong toolchain (MSVC instead of GNU).

I tried a lot of different fixes, but in the end the only thing that worked was moving to MSVC for building all build-tools. This makes our setup less special and makes such issues much less likely in the future.

This is a move that we've been wanting to make for a while anyway because we've been recommending the MSVC binaries for years since it integrates better with 99% of projects out there.

Our MinGW toolchain is also quite out of date and is lacking new features / APIs in Windows 10 and 11. However, we will continue to support it since there are still people that use MinGW on Windows.


There is a migration path where cerbero will refuse to run if you have a build-tools prefix which has been built with MinGW, and will tell you what commands to run to wipe and rebuild it.

Merge request reports

Loading