[Mingw-users] setup-mingw.bat - a simple batch MinGW installer

[Jonathan M. <jma...@fa...>]

For those missing a "real, nice, pretty, GUI" installer for the current
set of MinGW packages, and maybe also for those who prefer the command
line or want to customize what is installed:

  http://crosswire.org/~jmarsden/setup-mingw.html

describes and links to a setup-mingw.bat file I have written that does a
basic MinGW and MSYS installation, plus a bunch of "extra" stuff if you
need that.

It's not pretty, interactive, or graphical!  But if it helps someone
else  get started downloading and installing MinGW and MSYS in the
absence of a current official installer, without having to sit at the
computer clicking on far too many links on
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/ ... well, here it is :)

Once you have a basic MSYS installed this way, you can use it to
generate a current list of all the MinGW packages on that page:

wget -q -O- http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/ |grep tar \
 |grep href |sed -e 's/^.*href="//' -e 's%/download"$%%' -e 's%^.*/%%' \
 |grep tar |sort |uniq >mingw-files.txt

You can edit this list (it is currently over 600 packages long!) and add
the ones you are interested in to a file setup-mingw-extra-files.txt and
re-run setup-mingw.bat, and you'll download and install those, too.  A
sample (much shorter!) list of files is linked to from the web page
mentioned earlier.

I can't help feeling that overall it is clearer/easier/more in the
spirit of open source to give others a short script (batch) file, and
maybe a list of extra files, than to tar up a large tree of stuff,
transfer that large file to them, and say "here, untar this" :)

Suggestions for improvement welcomed (within reason... it's never going
to be pretty or graphical, and I don't want it to be interactive -- I
want to be able to start it and walk away while it does all the work!).

In case it needs to be said: setup-mingw.bat is totally unofficial, and
not in any way a part of the MinGW project itself.

Jonathan