Make install on MinGW / MSYS dislikes --prefix = / mingw

Question

I started using MinGW / MSYS, trying to use some Linux libraries on Windows. Using

./configure --prefix=/mingw make make install 

so far it works well, but I had two different libraries with the error "make install", by calling "ln -s". This happens something like this:

 rm -f /mingw/lib/libvamp-sdk.so.2 ln -s libvamp-sdk.so.2.0.0 /mingw/lib/libvamp-sdk.so.2 ln: creating symbolic link `/mingw/lib/libvamp-sdk.so.2' to `libvamp-sdk.so.2.0.0': No such file or directory make: *** [install] Error 1 

First, what is the intent of the makefile? / mingw / lib / libvamp -sdk.so.2.0.0 exists, therefore replacing the above ln -s call with

 ln -s /mingw/lib/libvamp-sdk.so.2.0.0 /mingw/lib/libvamp-sdk.so.2 

will work, but I'm not sure if this is what the author intended.

More importantly, why is this happening (I assume it works fine on native Linux systems) and what is the easiest way to get around this? I can manually edit the makefile, but I am wondering if there is a better solution for this.

Thanks so much for your input!

Answer 1

You configured your build incorrectly: *.so files are for Linux, not Windows. Most likely, you need to add a parameter, for example --host=i686-pc-mingw32 , to your configure call.

Answer 2

On Linux systems, unmodified

ln -s libvamp-sdk.so.2.0.0 / mingw / lib / libvamp-sdk.so.2

creates a relative symlink to create libvamp-sdk.so.2.0.0 for programs that were associated with earlier or later library instances. However, this only makes sense when creating systems based on .so.

These lines are simply not needed to create mingw, because you create DLLs instead of shared libraries, and the mechanism is different. These two lines can be safely removed from the Makefile, just make sure that the DLL and libraries (libfoo.a and libfoo.dll.a ) are installed, the first in / mingw / bin and the last in / mingw / lib. You will probably need to modify the Makefile for this.