[yocto] Targeting Windows platform

[Isaac Nickaein]

I know the idea is wild and possibly not a top priority (or even
priority) of the community, but extending the area of Yocto to support
Windows platform can make it the ubiquitous build system for the
enterprise, especially in embedded companies that have a mixture of
embedded and desktop applications.

In our company, we have adopted Yocto to be our build system for
embedded devices and are starting to use it for constant integration
and version management. It also solves the headache of setting up an
C++ environment  by building and provding an SDK that covers a large
set of libraries.

Having a unified build system can hugely simplify the build
management, version control and integration for large organizations
where various platforms are targeted. Yocto has proven to be a great
tool for this and I believe it has potential to cover this area too.

While Yocto is mainly used to build *images* for embedded targets, for
Windows platform it would be enough to build the binaries for
applications, at the first milestone at least. One can also extend it
to build setup files with tools such as WiX installer scripts. So, it
can be break down into:

1. Supporting a bbclass that creates Windows-compatible binaries. With
the help of compilers like mingw, there is the possibility.

2. Creating an SDK that targets Windows.

3. Adapting recipes to be able to build the sources for Windows (for
the cross-platform sources, this would be straight-forward).


I am not sure how much of effort these steps would take and what are
the obstacles. I would be glad to hear from community on what they
think and why this would or not happen.