Re: [gtkmm] Win32 development installation instructions

[Cedric Gustin <cedric gustin swing be>]

At 11:36 AM 3/10/2004, Robert wrote:

> I'd appreciate any comment on the remarks below,  to make sure I've got
> this right.
>
> It seems to me that there are at least 4 different possible
> configurations that people might mean when they loosely refer to
> "cygwin" under Windows.
>
> 1.  The cygwin development environment which resembles a unix
> environment in which you compile code containing POSIX calls and which
> produces executables depending on cywin.dll for POSIX emulation.

Right. The advantage of this setup : Most unix tools and libraries compile 
out the box (when they are not already available direcly from the cygwin 
website). Problem: I think you have to make your code GPL, because of the 
cygwin dll.

> 2.  The cygwin environment as above with MinGW headers and libraries
> installed in the cygwin environment.  Then using the gcc switch
> mno-cygwin you compile code containing Win32 (but not POSIX) calls
> and generate binaries that do not depend on cygwin.dll.

I have had many problems with this configuration. Last time I checked, C++ 
support was quite bad with -mno-cygwin. You also have to make sure that you 
never link against one of cyg*.dll.a import libraries. But I admit I 
haven't tested this configuration for a few months.

> 3.  The cygwin environment as above with the MinGW distribution
> separately installed.  Instead of using cygwin's gcc,  you put the
> MinGW distribution's bin directory on your path ahead of cygwin's.  Then
> you use MinGW's compiler (with no mon-cygwin switch of course).  The
> cygwin environment is now only a convenient set of unix command line
> tools.

That's my current configuration and the one I use to build gtkmm and pygtk 
on win32. Works nicely for me with two drawbacks :

1. You have to be extra carefull with the way your define your various 
*PATH* variables (\ vs / and spaces in directories) and your mount points.
2. libtool support works but is really a mess (more on this later if 
somebody is interested).

> 4.  Cygwin is not installed.  MinGW is installed along with the MSys
> command line tools.  This is like 3.,  except that the lighter weight
> MSys tools are used instead of the Cygwin environment.

I don't like to have redundant installations.

In conclusion, I'll definitively have to test config 2 again.

Cedric