We (the Fedora MinGW SIG) would like to propose https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Mingw-w64_cross_compiler as late Feature for Fedora 17

The Fedora MinGW SIG initially planned to introduce the mingw-w64 cross-compiler in Fedora 15. Unfortunately this turned out to be a no-go as we were pending on legal approval by Red Hat legal. For Fedora 16 we missed the boat as well, also because of the pending legal approval. As we weren't certain the legal approval would be in before the Fedora 17 feature submission deadline we decided not to submit the MinGW-w64 feature for Fedora 17 yet. We asked for a status update on the fedora-legal mailing list back in November last year (http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/legal/2011-November/001754.html) but we got no response on that as well. Also internal communication by multiple Red Hat employees didn't get things moving..

As we had to wait so long for the legal approval we started to perform the necessary development tasks in a separate yum testing repository. Various people have contributed to this testing repository by filing/fixing bugs and proposing improved packages. See the mailing list link I just mentioned for more details about the people who contributed to this testing repository

After talking to RH Legal in person at the FOSDEM some weeks ago things finally started to get rolling and we got the long-awaited legal approval at February 22.

As of that day we've been working nearly non-stop to get the toolchain itself (mingw-filesystem, mingw-gcc, mingw-binutils, mingw-crt and mingw-headers) in Fedora 17 and perform the necessary rebuilds. The mass rename exception of last week is an example of that work.

As of February 28 the necessary toolchain packages for the win32 target were imported in Fedora 17 and all original mingw* packages were rebuilt successfully against it

Last week we worked non-stop to get the toolchain for the win64 target bootstrapped and implemented all the package renames as indicated in the new MinGW packaging guidelines. This work has all been propagated to Fedora 17 now

All this work has been completed now, so the MinGW-w64 feature itself is 100% implemented in Fedora 17.

The only thing which is remaining is some cleanup work (like retiring the old mingw32-* packages and have them blocked by rel-eng), but we don't expect any breakage caused by that. We except to complete this cleanup in the next coming days (well before the F17 final development freeze)