Autoconf 2.69 and mingw

[Chris Johns]

Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>
> That said, their are 2 competing mingw system: mingw32 and mingw32-w64.
> The former is pretty much dead, while the latter is actively maintained
> and moving forward.

This is your opinion and not one I share. In terms of GCC, Binutils etc 
the MinGW64 people have been very active and that is great. Both 32bit 
and 64bit have progressed well in GCC. This how-ever is only one measure 
of "life" in these projects and not the whole picture.

The MinGW64 project is just about the compiler and its project name 
implies it is a 64bit version of the whole MinGW project. The MinGW 
project provides MSYS which is an old fork of Cygwin. Cygwin is the only 
other open shell environment on Windows that can run configure scripts. 
The main difference between MSYS and Cygwin is on MSYS native Windows 
compiler support is the default while on Cygwin it is a cross-compile. 
The other difference is in the default path translation between Windows 
paths and MSYS/Cygwin paths and this is the reason MSYS was forked from 
Cygwin. Cygwin requires more external support to use.

> Also, mingw32-w64-i686 is supposed to be compatible with mingw32.

This is a function of Windows and the fact both produce native Windows 
executables. You might be able to share libraries because both are gcc 
based.

> That said, the origin of mingw issues typically is the user, who is not
> able to setup the infrastructure underneath.

This is guess and does not help the discussion. The user may be 
brilliant at embedded design and embedded software.

> What lacks for mingw is an rtems toolchain installer, nothing else and
> nothing less.

How do you test your Windows executables now ?

Chris