Re: [Mingw-users] adding my own libraries to mingw

[Keith M. <kei...@us...>]

On 26 November 2010 10:16, William Simpson wrote:
>>> ... I am referring to my makefile,
>>> not Keith's. [Keith's did not work at all, as shown in the message
>>> below] ...
>>
>> In what way did it not work?
>
> This was what happened when I did a make:
> C:\MinGW\local\lib\src\rand>make
> gcc -c rand.c
> del librand.a
> Could Not Find C:\librand.a

So, I think we've established that's because you lose your current
working directory, when cmd.exe is spawned to run 'del'.

> ar rcvs librand.a rand.o
> a - rand.o

This appears to work, without loss of CWD.

> gcc   rand.o librand.a   -o rand

Where did this come from?  I don't recall it, in my original script.

> c:/mingw/bin/../lib/gcc/mingw32/4.5.0/../../../libmingw32.a(main.o):main.c:(.tex
> t+0xd2): undefined reference to `WinMain@16'
> collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
> mingw32-make: *** [rand] Error 1

John Brown (not his real name, I suspect) has already explained why the
above rogue command will cause this failure.

> But below you said to do make install, so:

Yes, because it is generally a bad idea to combine the logically
separate tasks of building and installing into a single operation; you
want an opportunity to test a new build before you cavalierly overwrite
a previous good installation with an untested, and possibly bad copy.
Thus, my version of the makefile separates the two tasks: "make" on its
own will perform the default "rand" task, to build librand.a in CWD; a
subsequent "make install" (after testing) installs it.

> C:\MinGW\local\lib\src\rand>make install
> copy librand.a c:/mingw/local/lib
> The system cannot find the file specified.
> mingw32-make: *** [install] Error 1

Again, because spawning cmd.exe lost CWD.

>> ... you need:
>>
>>  libdir = c:\mingw\local\lib
>>  includedir = c:\mingw\local\inlcude
>>
>> or maybe even:
>>
>>  libdir = c:\\mingw\\local\\lib
>>  includedir = c:\\mingw\\local\\inlcude
>
> Tried both. Each time, results identical to above.

Same reason: the source file to copy is in lost CWD.

>> (because make uses backslash as an escape; I don't know if GNU make
>> built for native windows is smart enough to guess when any single
>> backslash is intended to represent a path name separator, or an escape).
>
> I think \ by itself is ok.

Good to know.  GNU make generally does try to DTRT, but I do wonder if
there may be some cases where it may assume that a single backslash is
intended as a directory name separator, when the actual intent was for
it to be an escape?

> You know, I agree that Windows is complete crap, and that bash is far
> superior to cmd.exe. I have used linux since 1998. You don't need to
> convince me. But being forced to work in a Windows environment I have
> to be pragmatic. Maybe I will install MYSYS at some point, but for
> now, given my primitive skill set and needs, I think I can cope with
> cmd.exe vs bash. I would never use grep and other unix utilities.

IIRC, you said you used mingw-get for your initial installation?  In
that case, maybe:

  mingw-get install msys-tiny msys-make

will give you sufficient for your needs.  It will give you a bash shell,
plus the MSYS version of GNU make, plus a few other essentials -- you
would need to use rm rather than del, cp or ln rather than copy, and mv
rather than move or ren, so it includes them.

>> ...  (And please stop top-posting, or I may stop responding).
>
> OK sorry about top-posting.

No problem.  It's just that I will quickly lose interest, if you make me
scroll backwards and forwards, or read reams of barely relevant history,
to determine context for your replies.

-- 
Regards,
Keith.