I HAVE MADE FIRE: CrossCompiled Plugins for Windows

I post in hope that someone else can avoid my torture on building plugins for Breve. These problem were based on my low level experience with building dll, some problems because breve does not support a Windows-comaptible plugin-library and some bugs within the examples itself. The last mentioned are fixed, my work with the actual version 2.4 is very satisfying.

Now for those who have still problems. For this guide I assume the following:
* You have Breve 2.4 installed
* You want to build Plugins for the Windows Distribution of Breve (DLLs)
* You are willing to crosscompile via Cygwin and MinGW

1.
The need for crosscompiling lies in the support of the brevePlugin.a. This is a library compareable to a .lib in the windows world. Because a windows compiler can't use this you need a unix-emulator from which you use the .a Library but build a DLL for windows systems.

This emulator is Cygwin:
http://www.cygwin.com/

During the setup be sure to install the MinGW crosscompiler, that will be used instead of the gcc compiler. The advantage in MinGW are:
- I only got it running with it =)
- it can compile dlls without the need of a further library layer
("cygwin.dll").

2. From within Cygwin go into the "\plugins\samples" folder. Now tehre are two choices:
- change the makefile so it will use your MinGW compiler (not gcc).
- or (like me) you have further problems using the makefile and do it
manually:

assume that:
- mingw32-g++ is my compiler
- sample.cpp is the source file of my plugin
- plugin.dll will be the name of my resulting dll
- the plugin library (brevePlugin.a) is one directory higher (like it is by default)

mingw32-g++ -I.. -c -o sample.o sample.cpp
dlltool -z sample.def sample.o
mingw32-g++ -shared -o plugin.dll sample.o sample.def ../brevePlugin.a

This will produce some files only needed for the linking process (the .o and the definition file). If all compiled/linked without problems you have the plugin.dll which only has to be posted within your project directory.