FIXME: Page under construction; some useful content now, but by no means complete!!!

I will add to this as time permits; please bear with me. My intent is to provide answers to some remarkably similar, but independently asked, questions which have appeared recently, on the MinGW-Users and MinGW-MSYS lists.

Introduction

This Mini-HOWTO attempts to answer the FAQ: "Why can't the MinGW compilers find my project's header files?"

• My executable is sometimes different, when I compile and recompile the same source. Is this normal?
  • Yes, by default, and by design, ~MinGW's GCC does not produce ConsistentOutput, unless you patch it.

Page updated to current status, as of 15-September-2008.

Previous content of this page was confused, misleading and obsolete. Nevertheless, if you wish to refer to this older content, you may find it here.

For instructions on how to quickly download and install MinGW (including GCC compilers for C, C++, Fortran, Java, and Ada, binutils, Windows API, runtime, and make), please refer to the instructions for Getting Started with MinGW. For more detailed instructions, read HOWTO Install the MinGW GCC Compiler Suite.

Minimalist GNU for Win32 (updated for MinGW gcc 3.4.5)

NOTE:
Much of the information presented on this page is obsolete; updated information may be found here.

Pthreads is part of POSIX and Windows isn't a POSIX system. However, there is a third party library on sourceware.org named pthreads-win32. Sourceware.org provides its own lists and MinGW does not support it but you are free to use it with MinGW at your own risk.

About Specs file

The "gcc" program invoked by users is a convenient front-end driver executable which will invoke other programs in the background such as cc1, as or ld to do its work according to the command line parameter given. A specs file is plain text used to control the default behavior for the "gcc" front-end. The specs file is usually built-in but for flexibility purposes, it can be overridden with an external version.

Disclaimer

This procedure is not useful anymore since proposed changes have been merged in wxPython since 2.8.6.1. Now please follow [official wxPython build instruction].

Nevertheless, some steps may be interesting to port some other kind of C++ python extensions to cygwin/mingw.

For questions, remarks, or greetings : edouard{dot}tisserant[at]lolitech(dot)fr

This page will guide you through a typical, one size fits all, installation of MinGW. If you are new to MinGW, you may wish to refer to the MinGW page to learn which packages are required, and which tools are used to perform which tasks. For more advanced installation instructions, refer to HOWTO Install the MinGW (GCC) Compiler Suite.