How to use Mingw

[jtarbox]

First off, I got CVS head to compile (mostly) without errors. This is using tinyxml and I didn't bother with the current renderers as I'm making my own for Crystalspace.

1. run ./booststrap to generate the configure files. (it'd be nice if this was documented somewhere, maybe in the readme..)

2. Now, we need to comment out the PKG_CHECK_MODULES lines within ./configure, this is due to mingw not understanding those lines at all.

3. Since we already know where freetype is, lets let ./configure know by setting the following environment variable:

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export LDFLAGS="-L/path/to/freetypelib -lfreetype2"

4. And, since configure doesn't like catching that it needs to export the functions, we set another variable:

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export CXXFLAGS="-DCEGUIBASE_EXPORTS -DWINDOWSLOOK_EXPORTS -DTAHAREZLOOK_EXPORTS -I/path/to/freetype-include-file"

5. Since I only need CEGUI and not it's renderers, I'm disabling them here. If you want those enabled, feel free to play with the following command line, else here's what I used:

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./configure --disable-opengl-renderer --disable-irrlicht-renderer --without-ogre-renderer --without-xerces-c

6. Almost there, for some reason the tinyxml portion of the Makefile isn't correct (or our version of make sucks, whatever). Open ./src/Makefile and edit the two following lines such that they no longer have a new line between each filename:

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am__append_1 = CEGUITinyXMLParser.cpp tinyxml/tinystr.cpp tinyxml/tinyxml.cpp tinyxml/tinyxmlerror.cpp tinyxml/tinyxmlparser.cpp
am__append_2 = tinyxml/tinystr.h tinyxml/tinyxml.h

7. make

8. ignore errors with the Sample application as it's trying to use the renderers we disabled.

enjoy.

I'm not all that good with build system alterations, but to get this working properly in mingw the PKG_CHECK stuff would need to be altered (it's an unknown symbol to mingw), need to be able to manually specify where freetype is (Crystalspace dependancy package already comes with a pre-compiled freetype2 lib and includes, i just point to them), and somehow determine properly that it needs to set the EXPORT defines when run within mingw/msys.

_mental_, feel free to email me or pester me in IRC if you'd like help in trying to get a more permenant correction to the build files for mingw (jtarbox in #crystalspace - irc.freenode.net)

-jtarbox