RE: [Caml-list] Building pcre-ocaml 7.0.2 on MinGW

[David Allsopp <dra-news@metastack.com>]

Markus Mottl wrote:
> I have no experience with OCaml installations on Windows, but what
> concerns the configuration of pcre-ocaml, it actually does use pcre-
> config.  If the latter is not in your path, you can add the configure flag
> "--with-pcre-config {full path to pcre-config}" to make it work.

The problem is more subtle than that - pcre-config is there but it's a shell script which means that make (which uses sh) can execute it but ocamlbuild (which uses cmd on a Windows build) cannot. Arguably it's a deficiency of the Windows build of PCRE that it doesn't generate a .cmd version of pcre-config (but that's another m4 related headache!). I made the following two changes for my build environment:

After running ./configure (but therefore before make install) for PCRE:
	sed -i -e "1s/$/\n\nPATH=\/bin:\$PATH/" pcre-config
(that's necessary because when bash is invoked from a command shell it will interpret the Windows PATH and you need access to uname and test from Cygwin's /bin)

And then after installing I created pcre-config.cmd in the same directory as pcre-config (and therefore in my PATH as that's my OCaml bin directory):
@setlocal
@echo off
bash /cygdrive/c/Dev/OCaml/bin/pcre-config %*

It's possible that ocamlbuild could workaround this without the need for the extra script, but it's probably better to fix PCRE itself...


David