Re: [Mingw-users] Compiling libxml2.4.26 under Win2k (with mingwor cygwin)

[Greg C. <chi...@mi...>]

mar...@bt... wrote:
> 
> When you compile with MinGW... do you use cygwin and set the paths to point
> to MinGW's /bin? or do you use MSYS?

I only use MSYS. That's not to say cygwin wouldn't work.

> Also, I am doing this because I have written an application which is going
> to be funded and developed commercially and I need to make sure (in the
> unlikely event that some libraries are discontinued) that I can build ALL
> libraries involved from the ground up.  This includes GLIB, GTK, LIBXML,
> LIBGLADE (all ver 2) and a few others in-between (such as intl and iconv).

OK. Maybe the most common reason for using mingw instead
of cygwin is to avoid GPL. All my work is GPL, and I favor
mingw only because it produces binaries that run faster.
I'll assume you've looked into the licensing issues for
all these other libraries and determined that they're
compatible with your project's licensing terms.

> So far I have attempted to build ALL of these from MinGW out of the box on
> Win2k (with MSYS and CYGWIN) and been unsuccessfull in some way or another.
> Are there any guidelines as to how to install all/each of these packages?

Of the libraries you list, I've needed only libxml2 and
libiconv. IIRC libiconv built effortlessly with MSYS,
though libxml2 2.4.22 needed some work.

The only guideline I've seen is './configure ; make'.
The mailing list archives would contain some discussion
of problems encountered with particular packages.

It seems odd that you can't get any of these to work
even with cygwin. My cygwin installation (a few months
old) includes prebuilt libg.a, libintl.a, and libxml2.a
among others, so there has to be a way to build them.
If the cygwin people had to patch the gnu.org sources,
I'd imagine they'd work to get their patches accepted
by the library maintainers--it seems that every gnu
package I download is cygwin-aware. At any rate, you
can get the source they use from cygwin's site.

> At the moment, I can compile LIBGLADE and LIBXML myself with MSVC, but i'd
> rather not.

I feel the same way. It can't be necessary to use a
non-free compiler to build gnu sources. Suggest you
pick something simple, libiconv perhaps, and say here
exactly what steps you took to build it with exactly
which versions of mingw and MSYS, and cut and paste
the error messages--just like you did for libxml2,
but substituting a simpler library that others have
built without problems. Try looking through the
mailing list archives to see which of the libraries
you need have been most easily built by others.