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The 40original MinGW toolchain from the above site is only for 32-Bit Windows. As 41Windows Server - and also regular workstations - are moving to 64-Bit, it 42seems to be reasonable to have a toolchain that supports both architectures. 43I recommend to use the TDM gcc toolchain which you can find at 44http://tdm-gcc.tdragon.net/download. Go to the download section and select 45the bundle installer for tdm64 (MinGW-w64). This installs a multilib version 46of the gcc toolchain that can compile for native 32- and 64-Bit Windows 47versions. It also comes with a working pthread implementation. 48 49The latest config and build scripts we use for MinGW have only been tested 50for the gcc-4.6.1 compiler toolchain (or better). 51 52Using MinGW is a pragmatic decision, it's the easiest way to port this 53heavily UNIX based sourcebase to native Windows. The goal is of course 54to provide the includes, libraries and DLLs to be used with the more 55common traditional development environments on Windows, mainly with 56Microsoft Visual Studio. 57 58The TERM environment variable must be set specially to active the Windows 59console-driver. The driver checks if TERM is set to "#win32con" (explicit 60use) or if TERM is unset or empty (implicit). 61 62Please also make sure that MSYS links to the correct directory containing 63your MinGW toolchain. For TDM this is usually C:\MinGW64. In your Windows 64CMD.EXE command shell go to the MSYS root directory (most probably 65C:\MSYS or C:\MSYS\1.0) and verify, that there is a junction point mingw 66that points to the MinGW toolchain directory. If not, delete the mingw 67directory and use the mklink command (or the linkd.exe utility on older 68Windows) to create the junction point. 69 70This code requires WindowsNT 5.1 or better, which means on the client 71Windows XP or better, on the server Windows Server 2003 or better. 72 73I recommend using libtool to build ncurses on MinGW, because libtool 74knows exactly how to build dll's on Windows for use with MinGW. 75 76To build a modern but still small footprint ncurses that provides 77hooks for interop, I recommend using these options: 78 79 --with-libtool 80 --disable-home-terminfo 81 --enable-database 82 --disable-termcap 83 --enable-sp-funcs 84 --enable-term-driver 85 --enable-interop 86 87This is the configuration commandline as I'm using it at the moment (assuming 88environment variable MINGW_ROOT to hold the root directory name of your MinGW 89build): 90 91./configure \ 92 --prefix=$MINGW_ROOT \ 93 --with-cxx \ 94 --without-ada \ 95 --enable-warnings \ 96 --enable-assertions \ 97 --disable-home-terminfo \ 98 --enable-database \ 99 --enable-sp-funcs \ 100 --enable-term-driver \ 101 --enable-interop \ 102 --disable-termcap \ 103 --with-progs \ 104 --with-libtool \ 105 --enable-pc-files \ 106 --mandir=$MINGW_ROOT/share/man 107 108Please note that it is also necessary to set this environment variable: 109 110export PATH_SEPARATOR=";" 111 112in order to parse the terminfo paths correctly. Terminfo paths should 113always be separated by a seeeemicolon,even when running under MSYS. 114 115To support regular expressions properly, ncurses under MinGW should be 116linked against the gnurx regex library, which must be built separately 117under MinGW. See 118 119 ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/binaries/win32/dependencies/libgnurx-src-2.5.zip 120 121All the options above are - like the whole Windows support - 122experimental. 123 124A lot is still TODO, e.g.: 125 126 - Wide Character support (display is workable, but input untested) 127 The Win32Con driver should actually only use Unicode in the 128 future. 129 - Thread support (locking). If using TDM toolchain this is done by 130 configuring pthreads. 131 - A GUI console driver 132 - Support for Terminals attached via a serial port (via terminfo) 133 - Support for networked Terminal connections (via terminfo) 134 - Workarounds for MinGW's filesystem access are necessary to make infocmp 135 work (though tic works). 136 137To support terminfo, we would need to have an ioctl() simulation for the 138serial and networked terminals. 139