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#115 Please add a download link for the installer to the main pages
Hi,
I just spent almost two hours figuring out how to get MinGW + MSYS installed on a Win 10 system.
The difficulties result from the fact that all the main web pages, mainly those on sourceforge, point to misleading items, or so I get the impression. I might just as well be blind.
(P.S. If you don't want to read this all, skip to the end, where I found the solution)
Anyway, the fact that there is no installer link to find on SF nor on the mingw pages, makes me wonder if those who have write access to those pages are even aware of the difficulties this causes for me (us). Here's an account of what I went thru, to give you an idea:
I started here, which is a popular link using google to find mingw: http://www.mingw.org/wiki/Getting_Started
That points me to a apparently very outdated version of MinGW, which I was not aware of, because that website doesn't tell us so. And when I installed v3.1.0 using the installer it points out, I ended up with something that didn't work right. E.g, the instructions did not match what the latest installer did, and the result was that somehow the installation was missing some crucial files, e.g. make.exe, and the msys shell did not start right, either. The instructions on that website did not help, and they're all very old anyway.
Next, I googled again and found this: http://rperki.blogspot.de/2015/05/installing-mingw-w64-msys-on-win-81-x64.html
That sounded better. It points to http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/ , where I am supposed to download an installer from. But that sourceforge page only lists the source files, it appears, and when I looked into those, there was not even a README telling me what this is about (it would be nice if it would at least point to the website with the build instructions).
I also went to http://mingw-w64.org/doku.php, which tells me of a new version 4, but again, there is nothing that points me to an installer. All I found was another link to https://sourceforge.net/p/mingw-w64/wiki2/Home/ - there, I got pointed back to http://mingw-w64.org/doku.php/download, which only lists source distros but no installer, either.
How am I supposed to build this from sources when I start fresh? The whole point of me wanting to install MinGW is that I have a clean Windows system and want to get a C compiler working on it. But to build MinGW, I need a C compiler first, obviously. Catch-22.
Next, I dived into the SF "archive" section and eventually found the installer I was looking for:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw-w64/files/Toolchains%20targetting%20Win32/Personal%20Builds/mingw-builds/installer/
And that's all I needed to find these two past hours!
Oh my - and what happens after I've installed it? I find that it contains a "Open web site" link - and when I opened that, I got to the same SF page, and this time it actually shows me the installer for download and not the source files!
Guess what - I was browsing this whole time from a Mac, because, well, I am a Mac developer who runs Win in a VM so that I can build and test my plain C code on Windows, too. But that doesn't mean I want to use Windows all the time.
TL;DR
To make a long story short - it may sound smart to offer non-PC visitors not the installer.exe but the source code.
BUT: Please ALSO add a link to the installer regardless, because, as you can see above, I had no way of knowing where to find it just because I visited from a Mac (Linux users will probably had the same issue).
mingw and mingw-w64 are separate projects. The user facing website is http://mingw-w64.org/.