I am mostly ignoring the possibility to build natively on Windows
using MinGW. I don't see any reasoon to bother supporting that. If we
want to build with MinGW, we want to do it as cross-compilation.
I am not intentionally removing OOo-originated native MinGW
compilation stuff. Yet. But will soon...
NATIVE indicates that the BUILD and HOST platforms are the same,
i.e. a "normal" not cross-compiling build.
DESKTOP indicates a "normal" desktop/server OS, like Linux, Windows,
BSD or Mac OS X. (Non-desktop ones would be "mobile" ones like iOS and
Android.)
(All traditional, and so far only actually working, builds of OOo/LO
is both NATIVE and DESKTOP. The non-NATIVE and non-DESKTOP cases
belong in the experimental cross-compilation work.)
All non-DESKTOP cases are also non-NATIVE, at least so far. In other
words, when building for a mobile OS we always cross-compile. Note
that the reverse is not true: We eventually would want to
cross-compile to Windows, rarer Linux architectures, and PowerPC Mac
OS X.
DESKTOP is used in build.lst files to indicate modules that it makes
no sense to build for mobile platforms. Nobody is going to run
LibreOffice SDK tools on a tablet.
NATIVE is used in build.lst files to indicate modules that produce
just build-time executables (which can't be run on the BUILD system
when cross-compiling), and which are not part of the SDK either.
(Sadly the use of BUILD_TYPE keywords in the build.lst files is a bit
tedious: you have to mark a module in the build.lst files of all its
"parents", modules that depend on it, not in that of the module
itself.)
It does make sense to build SDK tools in the other cross-compilation
cases. There is no reason why we wouldn't want to cross-compile also
the executables that go into the SDK when cross-compiling to Windows,
for instance.
