Re: [Caml-list] Issues with OCaml on Windows, MinGW build

[Jonathan Protzenko <jonathan.protzenko@gmail.com>]

Hi,

On 11/24/2011 07:25 AM, Paul A. Steckler wrote:
> For a long while, we've been building software for Windows using the
> OCaml MinGW cross-compiler
> on Fedora. That tack allows building the software pretty much the same
> as it's built for native Linux.
> But the OCaml MinGW packages for Linux haven't been updated in some
> time, and that project
> appears moribund. We're already on to 3.12 in Linux, and the
> cross-compiler is stuck at 3.11 (and a
> beta version at that).
>
> So I thought I'd try building the software directly on Windows using
> the MinGW build. I downloaded
> the self-installer from
> http://gallium.inria.fr/~protzenk/caml-installer.html (am I the only
> one that thinks that
> blinking text in Web pages is passé?). I also downloaded MinGW/MSYS
That was intended as a joke. Sorry if that's not obvious.
> using the installer at
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/Installer/mingw-get-inst/mingw-get-inst-20111118/.
>
> Here are some issues I encountered when using this environment:
>
>   - Many of the OCaml executables in the distribution, as well as
> flexlib, invoke gcc with the flag
> '-mno-cygwin', but the MinGW gcc I installed does not, in fact, accept
> that flag. In emacs, I
> replaced the offending argument with spaces in the binaries to allow
> compilation to proceed (!).
I tried native compilation before releasing the installer. Could you 
tell me precisely what kind of command results in gcc being called with 
-mno-cygwin? Basic native compilation tests (ocamlopt) seemed to work. 
Also, please create an issue at 
https://github.com/protz/ocaml-installer/issues so that I can fix it for 
the next version. Thanks!
>
>   - You can't login to the MinGW shell to allow remote builds via ssh.
> I can get most of the
> required functionality by setting environment variables and calling
> the MinGW's sh.exe
> explicitly, but it would be useful to have instructions on how this should go.
Isn't it more of a mingw issue?
>
>   - When trying to build some standard OCaml packages, like cryptokit
> and oUnit, the 'configure'
> and 'make' steps fail badly. One reason is that 'configure' invokes an
> OCaml program which calls
> Sys.command, and on my computer, some of the arguments are filenames
> with spaces in them.
As Sylvain said, there's the issue of c:/foo/bar vs /c/foo/bar vs 
c:\foo\bar. One of them always work, it's just hard to know which one :).
>
> I managed to build a few packages, but it was difficult enough that
> I'm discouraged from proceeding
> further.
>
> Has anyone had success building standard packages using the MinGW distribution?
I haven't tried this, as I merely tried to provide a bare ocaml. If you 
have suggestions as to how I could make that easier for you *in the 
installer*, I'm all ears :).

Thanks for the feedback,

jonathan
>
> -- Paul
>
>