Question

I’m trying to build an application from source in windows that requires some Unix tools. I think it’s the apparently standard ./configure; make; make install (there’s no INSTALL file). First I tried MinGW but got confused that there was no bash, autoconf, m4, or automake exes in \bin. I’m sure I missed something obvious but I installed Cygwin anyways just to move forward. For some reason when I run

sh configure.sh

I get:

platform                    unix
  compiler                    cc
  configuration directory     ./builds/unix
  configuration rules         ./builds/unix/unix.mk

My OS has identity problems. Obviously the makefile is all wrong since I’m not on unix but win32. Why would the configure script think this? I assume it has something to do with Cygwin but if I remove that I can’t build it at all. Please help; I’m very confused.

Also is it possible to build using MinGW? What’s the command for bash and is mingw32-make the same as make? I noticed they’re different sizes.

Answer 1

Everything is fine. When you are inside CygWin, you are basically emulating an UNIX. sh runs inside CygWin, and thus identifies the OS correctly as Unix.

Have a look at GCW – The Gnu C compiler for Windows