Installing MingW

Some code bases, including Gnulib, depend on GNU toolchain features. To support these builds, you can install MinGW. This procedure explains how to do so.

From a command prompt:

mkdir c:\MinGW
cd c:\MinGW

(Or download the following elsewise if you don't have wget)

wget "http://j.mp/kMkmzR"
unzip mingw-get-0.2-mingw32-alpha-3-bin.zip
cd bin
mingw-get.exe install gcc g++ mingw32-make msys-base
PATH=%PATH%;c:\mingw\bin
C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\msys.bat

Which will open a new window, where you can run:

/postinstall/pi.sh 

You will see:

This is a post install process that will try to normalize between
your MinGW install if any as well as your previous MSYS installs
if any. I don't have any traps as aborts will not hurt anything.

Do you wish to continue with the post install? [yn] 

Answer: y

You will see:

Do you have MinGW installed? [yn] 

Answer: y

You will see:

Please answer the following in the form of c:/foo/bar.
Where is your MinGW installation? 

Answer: c:/mingw (yes, with forward slashes..)

You will see:

Creating /etc/fstab with mingw mount bindings.
Normalizing your MSYS environment.

You have script /bin/cmd

Oh joy, you do not have c:/mingw/bin/make.exe. Keep it that way.

And it's done.