在Windows 8上修复MinGW安装

Question

While helping my friend spin up MinGW and a C++ environment on his Windows 8 computer, I ran the get-mingw script and waited as it ran through all the mirrors for required downloads. However, three downloads completely failed:

• libltdl - installer script hung and then moved on after pressing "OK"
• automake-1.11 - installer script tried finding 1.10, then 1.9, then 1.8, then 1.7 (all of which failed) until finally settling on 1.6
• mktemp - script hung and moved on after pressing "OK"

In all three cases, the script gave me a nice error log upon completion, showing that a majority of packages had been downloaded and installed except for these three, which showed up as errors. However during the installation process I had simply gone to the MinGW sourceforge page and manually found and downloaded each .bin.tar.lzma file that was missing.

Now that I have them, is there a good accepted way to unpack and plug them into my friend's existing MinGW install? In case it's tough, I'm comfortable with unix and dos command line so I'll be able to move executables into the MinGW/bin folder if that's what's needed, I just want to check for the best way to 'fix' the install.

As a side note - even though the error log says these are required packages, adding MinGW/bin/ to the PATH still allows for use of gcc and g++ , although not make (possibly because of automake failure?). Is this standard behavior?

Answer 1

Firstly, the package issue can be fixed by using the MinGW installer - keep the packages selected and go to "apply changes" and the script will probably try to redownload the missing packages. I think the original problem was probably just a shoddy wifi connection during repository connection.

However, I then ran into a problem where I tried to run gcc and it gave me a missing -lpthread error ... but this question was able to help me fix that, and gcc and g++ are working fine now (haven't opened and tested Eclipse yet though). Just in case of link decay, the issue I cited arises from the MinGW installer script not downloading the lpthread library upon installation. To fix that issue, quoted from link:

Just run and open MinGW Installation Manager, which should be pre-installed with MinGW, select "All Packages" on the left panel, and on the right panel, search for "mingw32-pthreads-w32" packages and install them.

I think the Installation Manager has libpthread and pthread available for install, and pthread libs were the ones that seemed to solve it for me.