Re: MinGW build instructions

["Eli Zaretskii" <eliz at gnu dot org>]

> Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 15:15:50 -0400
> From: Christopher Faylor <me@cgf.cx>
> 
> >Also, the configuration that you suggest: some part of Cygwin and the
> >MinGW compiler, will probably suffer from incompatibilities due to
> >Cygwin file names that the MinGW compiler probably doesn't understand,
> >symlinks that the utilities such as ln support, but the MinGW compiler
> >might not, etc.
> 
> I don't see why.

Because the configure script runs the compiler to probe the system.
If configure creates symlinks, the compiler might fail because it
doesn't support them.  Also, in some packages, the script creates
symlinks which the compiler then needs to access during the build,
like in the case of nm-* files in GDB.

> It's odd that you apparently don't like my not being specific enough but
> then go on to postulate general problems with things that you haven't
> tried.

I didn't postulate them, I just suggested that perhaps there might be
a problem.

FWIW, in my few attempts to build GNU packages with MinGW I found that
a Unixy shell is the only missing part, as long as you don't need to
run Automake, Autoconf, etc.  After some looking around, I used the
MinGW ports of the standard utilities and a Windows port of zsh that I
found on the net.  It worked quite well, but that was a simple
package, nowhere near the complexities of GDB, with its multilevel
subdirectories.

> >So I don't really understand why you don't like their alternative.  Is
> >it known to have some serious problems?
> 
> How much would you like someone saying "I've got this new version of
> tools that I've called CFGPP" if the tools were a repackaging of DJGPP
> with some patches?

Ah, okay.  I thought there were some technical problems.  Thanks for
the info.