The Issue
=======
For a long time now MinGW has been unsupported and unmaintained and at this point,
it looks like something that we should just leave behind and move on.
Why Remove
==========
One of the big motivations for MinGW back in the day is that it was free compared to MSVC which was licensed based.
However, now that this is no longer true we have basically stopped updating the need CMake files.
Along with the CMake files, there are several patches to the extern libs needed to make this work. For example, see:
https://developer.blender.org/diffusion/B/browse/master/extern/carve/patches/mingw_w64.patch
If we wanted to keep MinGW then we would need to make more custom patches to the external libs and
this is not something our platform maintainers are willing to do.
For example, here is the patches needed to build python: https://github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages/tree/master/mingw-w64-python3
Fixes T51301
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2648
starting from version 2.64. Unless you have a special system setup, this means the
will be in ~/.config/blender rather than ~/.blender.
When the version number is changed to 2.64, the "Copy Previous Settings" operator
in the splash will copy the settings to the new location.
XDG base directory specification:
http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html
Not all file formats/calls are supported yet. It will be expended.
Please from now on use BLI_fopen, BLI_* for file manipulations.
For non-windows systems BLI_fopen just calls fopen.
For Windows, the utf-8 string is translated to utf-16 string in order to call UTF version of the function.
Slightly modified to better fit in architecture (moved to related GHOST SystemPaths)
Thanks to Harley Acheson for the research and for providing the original patch.
Note: I added empty function for X11(Linux) and Mac (Carbon and Cocoa) to be implemented still.
