Building libsigc++ on Win32 =========================== Currently, both the cygwin (posix layer) and mingw (native win32) gcc compilers are supported through the gnu autotools (automake, autoconf, libtool. Because the major purpose of the libsigc++ library is to be used for signal/callback handling in the gtkmm library, mingw is of course the main target. 1. Cygwin While using gcc as provided by cygwin, compilation should be as simple as typing ./configure make make install 2. Mingw The mingw distribution which has been tested with this release is the following MinGW-1.1 as the base distribution plus the update packages : mingw-runtime-1.3 bunutils-2_12_90-20020518-1 w32api-1.4-2 The bare mingw distribution does not provide the necessary tools (sh, perl, m4 , autoconf, automake, ..) to run the provided configure script "as is". One (currently non supported) solution is to use mingw in conjunction with msys, which is readily available on the mingw website (http://www.mingw.org/). The preferred method is to combine the cygwin distribution (for the unix tools that were mentioned above) with mingw by making sure that the mingw tools (gcc, ld, dlltool, ..) are called first. The configure script can be called using (as an example) the following options ./configure --prefix=/target --build=i386-pc-mingw32 --disable-static then make make check make install Because Dll support with libtool on the mingw32 platform is fairly recent, it requires developement version of autoconf/automake and libtool, as provided by the autotools-devel package in the cygwin distribution. Currently, this means libtool : 1.4e automake : 1.5b autoconf : 2.52 IMPORTANT WARNING : the libtool scripts contained in the source distribution of the library might not be recent enough to support dll creation. It will create a static library instead. The main reason for this situation comes from the fact that the gnome distribution uses the last stable releases of the autotools, as opposed to their development (cvs) versions. Therefore, it is recommended to always checked the version of libtool that is being used when compiling libsigc++ on win32 by calling libtool --version once it has be created by the configure script. If libtool is too old, it will be necessary to overwrite it using libtoolize --force from the cygwin autotools-devel package (usually located on /usr/autotools/devel), followed by aclocal automake autoconf before running the configure script again. In the future, a specially tuned source distribution along with a binary package might be provided for mingw. 3. Oher compilers (MSVC, borland) While some compiler options are present in sigc++/config/sigcconfig.h.in, other compilers are currently not supported but anyone is free to give it a try !
