1------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2-- Copyright 2020 Thomas E. 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IN -- 19-- NO EVENT SHALL THE ABOVE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, -- 20-- DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR -- 21-- OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE -- 22-- USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE. -- 23-- -- 24-- Except as contained in this notice, the name(s) of the above copyright -- 25-- holders shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the -- 26-- sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior written -- 27-- authorization. -- 28------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 29-- $Id: README.MinGW,v 1.10 2020/02/02 23:34:34 tom Exp $ 30-- Author: Juergen Pfeifer 31------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 32 33This is work in progress, but it's in an state where one can see it 34works at least on the Windows Console. 35 36You should install the MSYS package, so that you've a shell environment that 37allows you to run the scripts, especially configure etc. You can get that 38from http://www.mingw.org 39 40To build ncurses for native Windows, you need the MinGW toolchain. The 41original MinGW toolchain from the above site is only for 32-Bit Windows. As 42Windows Server - and also regular workstations - are moving to 64-Bit, it 43seems to be reasonable to have a toolchain that supports both architectures. 44I recommend to use the TDM gcc toolchain which you can find at 45http://tdm-gcc.tdragon.net/download. Go to the download section and select 46the bundle installer for tdm64 (MinGW-w64). This installs a multilib version 47of the gcc toolchain that can compile for native 32- and 64-Bit Windows 48versions. It also comes with a working pthread implementation. 49 50The latest config and build scripts we use for MinGW have only been tested 51for the gcc-4.6.1 compiler toolchain (or better). 52 53Using MinGW is a pragmatic decision, it's the easiest way to port this 54heavily UNIX based sourcebase to native Windows. The goal is of course 55to provide the includes, libraries and DLLs to be used with the more 56common traditional development environments on Windows, mainly with 57Microsoft Visual Studio. 58 59The TERM environment variable must be set specially to active the Windows 60console-driver. The driver checks if TERM is set to "#win32con" (explicit 61use) or if TERM is unset or empty (implicit). 62 63Please also make sure that MSYS links to the correct directory containing 64your MinGW toolchain. For TDM this is usually C:\MinGW64. In your Windows 65CMD.EXE command shell go to the MSYS root directory (most probably 66C:\MSYS or C:\MSYS\1.0) and verify, that there is a junction point mingw 67that points to the MinGW toolchain directory. If not, delete the mingw 68directory and use the mklink command (or the linkd.exe utility on older 69Windows) to create the junction point. 70 71This code requires WindowsNT 5.1 or better, which means on the client 72Windows XP or better, on the server Windows Server 2003 or better. 73 74I recommend using libtool to build ncurses on MinGW, because libtool 75knows exactly how to build dll's on Windows for use with MinGW. 76 77To build a modern but still small footprint ncurses that provides 78hooks for interop, I recommend using these options: 79 80 --with-libtool 81 --disable-home-terminfo 82 --enable-database 83 --disable-termcap 84 --enable-sp-funcs 85 --enable-term-driver 86 --enable-interop 87 88This is the configuration commandline as I'm using it at the moment (assuming 89environment variable MINGW_ROOT to hold the root directory name of your MinGW 90build): 91 92./configure \ 93 --prefix=$MINGW_ROOT \ 94 --with-cxx \ 95 --without-ada \ 96 --enable-warnings \ 97 --enable-assertions \ 98 --disable-home-terminfo \ 99 --enable-database \ 100 --enable-sp-funcs \ 101 --enable-term-driver \ 102 --enable-interop \ 103 --disable-termcap \ 104 --with-progs \ 105 --with-libtool \ 106 --enable-pc-files \ 107 --mandir=$MINGW_ROOT/share/man 108 109Please note that it is also necessary to set this environment variable: 110 111export PATH_SEPARATOR=";" 112 113in order to parse the terminfo paths correctly. Terminfo paths should 114always be separated by a seeeemicolon,even when running under MSYS. 115 116To support regular expressions properly, ncurses under MinGW should be 117linked against the gnurx regex library, which must be built separately 118under MinGW. See 119 120 ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/binaries/win32/dependencies/libgnurx-src-2.5.zip 121 122All the options above are - like the whole Windows support - 123experimental. 124 125A lot is still TODO, e.g.: 126 127 - Wide Character support (display is workable, but input untested) 128 The Win32Con driver should actually only use Unicode in the 129 future. 130 - Thread support (locking). If using TDM toolchain this is done by 131 configuring pthreads. 132 - A GUI console driver 133 - Support for Terminals attached via a serial port (via terminfo) 134 - Support for networked Terminal connections (via terminfo) 135 - Workarounds for MinGW's filesystem access are necessary to make infocmp 136 work (though tic works). 137 138To support terminfo, we would need to have an ioctl() simulation for the 139serial and networked terminals. 140