1: A note on Windows/MinGW support
    2: 
    3: Now you can compile Gauche to use MinGW runtime library
    4: (see http://www.mingw.org/ ), so that the produced binary can
    5: be easily distributed.   Although many system-related functions
    6: don't work because MinGW is not quite POSIX, it may be useful
    7: for Windows users to try out Gauche without installing the pile
    8: of other libraries.
    9: 
   10: The quality is experimental.  Tests fail miserably.  We'll
   11: gradually add support layer to emulate the features MinGW lacks.
   12: 
   13: 
   14: [Compilation]
   15: 
   16: Although you can run pre-compiled Gauche/mingw stand-alone,
   17: you need cygwin enviroment to compile it.  (I haven't tried
   18: MSYS.  It may work, too).
   19: 
   20: First, set PATH so that MinGW's gcc comes before Cygwin gcc.  
   21: For example, if you installed MinGW environment under C:/mingw, say:
   22: 
   23:   $ PATH=/cygdrive/c/mingw/bin:${PATH}
   24: 
   25: Now you can run configure with --build option to tell you'll 
   26: configure for mingw.  It is better to set the encoding utf8,
   27: to deal with multibyte file names.
   28: 
   29:   $ ./configure --build=i386-pc-mingw32 \
   30:                 --enable-multibyte=utf8 \
   31:                 --prefix=/path/to/install
   32: 
   33: (You can use 'i586' or 'i686', depending on which processor
   34: you have).
   35: 
   36: Then you can make it.  (Make sure you start from a clean source 
   37: tree; if you have remaining stuff from cygwin build, for example,
   38: you'll fail.  Good way to make sure of it is to run 'make distclean'
   39: before configure.)
   40: 
   41: You need a bit of trick for installation, though.  Give the
   42: Cygwin version of gosh as GOSH parameter.  You also have to run
   43: install-mingw target.
   44: 
   45:   $ make
   46:   $ make GOSH=/path/to/cygwin/gosh install
   47:   $ (cd src; make GOSH=/path/to/cygwin/gosh install-mingw)
   48: 
   49: If you want to specify the installation directory by --prefix, 
   50: you should give it a Cygwin pathname.   Unlike the normal Gauche,
   51: however, the installation path won't be embedded in the Gauche 
   52: library; gosh and gauche-config will know its installed 
   53: location at runtime.  So you can move the installed Gauche tree
   54: afterwards.
   55:  
   56: In the src/ directory, there's a shell script mingw-dist.sh
   57: which configures, builds and creates a zip archive of MinGW
   58: distribution.  
   59: 
   60: 
   61: [Building extensions]
   62: 
   63: We checked at least Gauche-gl works with MinGW version of gosh.
   64: Again, you need Cygwin environment to build the extension
   65: (you have to run ./configure after all).
   66: However, you no longer need Cygwin version of gosh; actually,
   67: you have to set a path so that the ./configure script finds
   68: MinGW version of gosh, gauche-config and other gauche-* tools.
   69: 
   70: Just ./configure, make, and make install should work.
   71: 
   72: 
   73: 
   74: