[Mingw-users] Mingw does not allow a quick evaluation test

[Jan-Oliver W. <ja...@in...>]

Dear all,

I planned to test mingw as an development environment for
Windows. Being a Free Software developer I am not too
familiar with windows but, alas, sometimes you can not
get around that OS.

To make it short: I was not able to perform the quick
evaluation test.

To let you know I list the items that occured:

- what should be downloaded? 
	The download link goes to sourceforge, but
	the files listed there are not in sync with what is
	described on the link for the "latest development snapshot".
	The latter
	(ftp://ftp.nanotech.wisc.edu/pub/khan/gnu-win32/mingw32/snapshots/gcc-2.95.2-1/)
	is not exactly in sync with the installation description again,
	but fits better.

- how to install?
	The corresponding FAQ is very short and (see above) out of sync with
	the downbloadable files. What I am missing is a quick guide to
	"Hello World".

- missing tools?
	The installation guide results in a installation without make, tar
	and a shell.
	While the latter is not that important, how should I unpack the
	tar.gz updates?

I am pretty sure that I will get the mingw up and running if I spend
some time in it (you provide lots of documents).
I like your basic idea, but propose to make it easier
to just start with. Once started people will spend more time with it
an learn.

And finally: I intended to send this not to the mailing list,
but the place where I expected to have a contact for the team
was empty: http://www.mingw.org/who.shtml

And the very last question:
Why the hell do I get lots of animated pictures etc when I go
to http://mingw.org/ instead of http://www.mingw.org/?

Good luck with the further development of mingw!

Cheers

	Jan

-- 
Jan-Oliver Wagner               http://intevation.de/~jan/

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