[Iverilog-devel] MinGW builds

[Martin W. <mai...@ma...>]

Folks,

The good news is that, courtesy of the Git for Windows and MSYS2 projects, 
it's got a lot easier to install a build environment for Icarus under Windows.

The catch is that MSYS2 uses the mingw-w64 fork of MinGW (for both 32-bit and 
64-bit builds). This is not 100% compatible with the original MinGW (32-bit 
only). The differences are not great - generally mingw-w64 doesn't have the 
quirks of the original MinGW, so is more compatible with *nix.

Unfortunately, when run in the 32-bit MSYS2 environment, config.guess outputs 
the same tuple string as it does in the original MSYS environment, so it is 
not easy to handle the differences.

As the original MinGW project seems to be stagnating (last update was 
Sep-2013), whereas the mingw-w64 project is still being actively developed, 
and as it is easier to install a build environment for the latter, I propose 
we drop support for the original MinGW. Does anyone want to argue against this.

Note that I don't generally use Windows myself, so I'm looking to minimise the 
time I have to spend on maintaining the Windows builds.

Martin