guide to mingw make files mingw32-make

Question

I'm a C++ programmer and have experience with GCC on Linux. I want to develop an application in Windows , so i need a full guide to mingw make files, variables and mingw32-make. Is there anybody who can introduce a resource for this?

Solution

mingw32-make is just a pre-built version of GNU make, so http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/ should have all of the information you need.

Comments

[Tormod Volden]

According to mingw.org/wiki/FAQ mingw32-make is "lacking in some functionality" compared to normal make.

[James Kanze]

@TormodVolden Interesting. I don't know what functionality they are talking about; I tend to use mingw32-make even under CygWin. It's faster, and at least in the past, has been more up to date. There are differences: mingw32-make respects the $SHELL environment variable, which Unix make doesn't, and of course, if you use $(shell ...), it will depend on the shell you invoke and the tools you have installed. (But if the shell is bash, and you have CygWin installed and in your path, it works pretty much like Unix.)

[James Kanze]

@TormodVolden On rereading the page you site, I understand it to be saying that the program named make in the MinGW distribution is lacking some functionality, not the program named mingw32-make. (But maybe it's the opposite---the page isn't too clear, and I can't find any other documentation about this on the site.)

[alecov]

There are also other important differences. mingw32-make is really a different version of make loosely patched to support Win32-style paths, and will not work properly if used in connection with any Unix-style shell -- in fact, problems will occur if it finds sh in PATH. In general, you cannot use the same makefiles written for make with mingw32-make.

[not2qubit]

minggw32-make seem to have been removed and it's use have likely been deprecated from any recent mingw packages, at least on Cygwin. I haven't seen this for years, unless I have missed something.

[WolleTD]

mingw32-make is still shipped with MinGW32-w64. While CMake is complaining about sh in $PATH when trying to generate MinGW Makefiles, I never had problems creating Unix Makefiles after renaming/copying mingw32-make.exe to make.exe.

[WolleTD]

Oh, I just found the build configuration for mingw32-make. There are exactly two patches applied to upstream-make that seem to not drastically change any behaviour: github.com/Alexpux/MINGW-packages/tree/master/mingw-w64-make