Building libConfuse on Windows with MSYS2/MINGW64

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libConfuse builds on Windows using its normal GNU autotools flow inside

an MSYS2 environment. This is the tested, supported method -- the same

steps run on every commit, see the "msys2" job in the source tree's

.github/workflows/build.yml.

The build.bat and hand-written Makefile also in this directory target a

long-obsolete MinGW toolchain and do not build the bundled fmemopen() and

reallocarray() replacements that Windows needs, so linking against their

output fails with undefined references (see issue #172). They are kept

only for historical reference -- use the steps below instead.

Prerequisites

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1. Install MSYS2, see https://www.msys2.org/

2. Open the "MSYS2 MINGW64" shell (not the plain MSYS shell).

3. Install the build tools:

pacman -S git gcc make autoconf automake libtool flex \

gettext-devel pkgconf doxygen

Build and install

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./autogen.sh

./configure --prefix=/mingw64

make

make check # optional, runs the unit tests

make install

To skip the example programs, which only add libtool wrapper warnings

under recent GCC, configure with --disable-examples.

This installs the shared library libconfuse-*.dll and its import library,

the confuse.h header, and the libconfuse.pc pkg-config file, all under

/mingw64.

Using the library

-----------------

With pkg-config:

gcc myprog.c $(pkg-config --cflags --libs libconfuse) -o myprog.exe

or directly:

gcc -I/mingw64/include myprog.c -L/mingw64/lib -lconfuse -o myprog.exe