The hello world project sample wouldn’t compile until I manually added C:\MinGW\bin to the path. Now it can find gcc but now it gives me this rather cryptic message:
sh -c "autoreconf -i"
My opinion of the tools might improve if I could get HelloWorld to compile. It’s not exactly a big ask.
The sh -c "autoreconf -i" message is presented as an error by Eclipse. It looks to me more like a fragment of script, which is puzzling. No, wait, it’s a two line message and Eclipse has hidden the actual error message, which is
Cannot run program "sh": Launching failed
This at least looks like an error message. Presumably “sh” is a shell. I suppose this means I have to guess what and where it is, and add that to the path also.
If you have an experience like this, read this link and all will become clear including how to cope.
A glitch in the Juno Eclipse UI leads newcomers astray. If you have an experience like mine read this.
A decade later VS Code is everything that Eclipse tried to be, with a much lower bar to entry. I think it also has a considerably better user experience, and its meteoric uptake suggests this is not entirely subjective.
Things like build environments remain troublesome, for reasons that have to do more to do with CLIs and the a priori knowledge they require than anything else. In the above example, Eclipse made it worse by hiding half the message, but you still have to know what the message means and how to resolve it. The Eclipse designers would probably say they didn’t expect a CLI toolchain message to have an embedded line break, but this is so likely that I have no sympathy for the oversight.