[Freeciv-Dev] Cygwin installation

["Brandon J. Van Every" <vanevery@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I gave up on www.mingw.org .  I can't get libpng to build on it, and I
suspect there are some serious things wrong with it.  Certainly, there
are more things wrong with it than I'm willing to spend time on anymore.
4 days is ridiculous!  Per's attempt seems to confirm my experience.
The Freeciv instructions need to warn that MinGW and Cygwin aren't the
same thing, what their respective home pages are, and that MinGW can be
big trouble to get working.

I tried to reinstall Cygwin from www.cygwin.com but at first it didn't
work.  BASH couldn't find any simple binutils like ls, etc.  I nuked all
MinGW stuff, nuked all Cygwin stuff according to instructions for manual
removal at http://cygwin.com/faq.html, most importantly nukeing the
registry entries!  Reinstalled, and now Cygwin is functional.  The
Freeciv instructions should admonish to start from scorched earth,
because this Windoze stuff can be flakey.

A lot of things in the Cygwin package need to be installed, and I think
the Freeciv instructions should list them out.  Otherwise, "install
everything" is a pretty piggish instruction for people with dialup
connections.  I think gcc vs. gcc-mingw is a potential trouble spot.
This time I'm installing both.  Earlier I didn't, because the Freeciv
instructions kept talking about mingw so I thought I only needed that.
Too much thinking causes trouble.  ;-)  Also there's regular zlib and
mingw version of zlib.  Also there are "stable" vs. "devel" versions of
some tools and libraries, particularly autoconf and automake.  Not sure
what the consequences of those are.

Ok, my machine type according to configure and config.guess is
  i686-pc-cygwin

With all this talk about mingw, I'm not sure that's what's really
supposed to be happening.  So I have tried
./configure --build=i686-pc-mingw32.  Neither one solves problems
however.

In non-mingw case, I don't have a GTK installation, and since the last
GTK installation recursively ate my files, I'm trepidatious about what
the "right" way to do that is.  Any advice for the gunshy?

In the mingw case, it says I don't have libpng.  I do, but I guess it's
not a mingw version of it.

I'm really concerned about whether, canonically, everything is supposed
to be done with mingw flags and build specifiers, or not.  This is
making it completely non-trivial to get a build environment going on
Windoze.  There needs to be a canonical way to do this stuff.  If there
is no canon, what exactly is the way people are typically doing it?



Cheers,                     www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every           Seattle, WA

Taking risk where others will not.