Newbie needs help using mingw with cygwin

[Warren Young]

Mark wrote:
> 
> I had thought that by modifying my etc/profile to pick up mingw istead of the
> GCC bundled in cygwin 

If that's the limit of your goal, then yes, it can be done, but it's a 
bit more involved than just changing the PATH.  Here's the Bourne shell 
script I use, which I call 'mingw':

#!/bin/sh
PATH=/c/mingw/bin:/c/windows:/c/windows/system32:/c/cygwin/bin
echo "Say 'exit' to leave MinGW shell and restore Cygwin environment."
/usr/bin/bash --rcfile ~/.mingwrc

Then in ~/.mingwrc:

alias make=mingw32-make
PS1='MinGW: \W \$ '

There's a way around having to split the functionality into two files 
like this, but it changes the way you have to run the shell script, and 
that runs counter to my keyboard habits.  Besides, you would then lose 
out on a neat side benefit: when you exit the MinGW subshell, all of the 
changes made to enter MinGW mode revert.  This is very helpful to me 
when I'm testing under both environments: I work in Cygwin mode as long 
as I can, then pop into MinGW where and only as long as necessary.  Back 
in Cygwin mode, my environment works just like before.

Note that the script completely rewrites the PATH to ensure that MinGW's 
bin directory appears before Cygwin's, so that anything they have in 
common always comes from the MinGW side.  If you have other directories 
that you want in your PATH, you can tack them on in the .mingwrc file:

export PATH=$PATH:/my/path/here

By the way, I should note that I've used "mount -c /" on this system, so 
either do that on your system, too, or change all "/c" to "/cygdrive/c".

I alias 'make' to 'mingw32-make' to hide the Cygwin make.  MinGW make 
has some Windows/DOS quirks in it that I happen to need.  (This is why 
they give it a different name, by the way.)  I habitually type 'make' so 
I can't afford to have Cygwin's make in the way while I'm working in 
MinGW mode.  If Cygwin's make works for you, I'd recommend removing this 
alias, as the MinGW quirks can cause problems if you don't need them.

The change in the prompt is to remind myself that I'm in a subshell, and 
that exiting will take me back to Cygwin mode, not close the window. 
The "echo" message says much the same thing, but that only helps while 
it's still in your short-term memory.  It's easy to forget that you're 
still in MinGW mode, without the custom prompt.

Now, this doesn't somehow give you the ability to build POSIX programs 
using only MinGW.  Its only purpose is to let you use the Cygwin 
userland tools while building with MinGW; think of it as an alternative 
to MSYS.  This only helps you if the program will build using pure Win32 
APIs.  The fact that it uses a configure script is a pretty good 
indicator that it uses POSIX APIs, though not an infallible one.  It's 
possible to use autoconf for a pure Win32 program, but rarely done.

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