First of all thanks for the many comments and tests that people are carrying out on the windows test builds - we've had over 2000 downloads of the snapshots builds and the preview2 release for windows (combined) so I guess there must really be people using windows OS out there. :-)

Freddy and I did more work on the windows build over the weekend and we are at the point now where nearly everything builds under windows natively (without cross compilation). The last remaining hurdle is python support needed for the mapserver export tool. Note that I emphasised 'build' two sentances back because although everything builds there are going to be issues with things not working as expected.

Its been really good to get the level of feedback we have received for the win build. Sören Gebbert has been running GRASS unit tests for us and uncovered a few issues with GRASS support so that was a great help. Hartmut Tschauner has been putting the test builds through their paces and letting us know of any problems he encounters which is also great. Pascal Ferrand has been letting us know when he finds plugins etc. missing. Quite a few others have also contributed suggestions so my apologies for not mentioning everyone by name - your work is still appreciated!

At other users suggestions Ive now added the gdal command line tools to the application bundle (still untested). I've also added gpsbabel.exe (also untested).

So its really great to have so many people testing, offering hints and suggestions etc. As soon as we get python support working I will tag SVN as preview3. This will be the final preview release before the final release at years ends. After preview3 release I will scurry about trying to mop up the remaining windows issues like plugins not behaving as they should etc. I look forward to your continued feedback and bugfix suggestions then!

One last thing

I've updloaded a new copy of the msys build environment, a debug build of qgis (with console output to aid in bug reporting) and a release version (i.e. no debug symbols) of SVN trunk to the server for all who would like to get involved.

http://qgis.org/uploadfiles/testbuilds/
http://qgis.org/uploadfiles/msys/