SDL - feedback on inst of SDL-devel-1.2.11-mingw32.tar.gz

SDL Development
1

Hi all,

This is a report on the installation of the MinGW developer’s
library on MinGW/msys. I realize some of these issues may have
already been fixed, so I am currently grabbing the 1.2 branch from
the svn repo, but the net connection from here is still a bit
spotty, and I don’t want to start filing bugs unnecessarily.

I did took a look around the website and the wiki but didn’t find
anything that discusses the installation of the
SDL-devel-1.2.11-mingw32.tar.gz file. So if this is redundant and
I haven’t been paying attention to posts, I apologize in advance.

Setup: WinXP/Home/SP2. Fresh installation of MinGW 5.0.2 and Msys
1.0.10, separate dirs. I am using msys’s make (3.79.1), running
bash (2.04.0(1)) on rxvt.

All the following is specific for “make native”.

make initially says install is up to date. So I renamed INSTALL to
something else, then ran “make native” again.

make then dies with:
ln: creating symbolic link /usrbin/sdl-config' toi386-mingw32msvc-sdl-config’: No such file or directory

This is due to the following line in Makefile:
make install prefix=/usr

where “/usr” should be “/usr/”.

Also, this:
@ln -sf i386-mingw32msvc-sdl-config $(prefix)bin/sdl-config

looks like a change of directory is needed. This worked for me:
@ln -sf $(prefix)bin/i386-mingw32msvc-sdl-config
$(prefix)bin/sdl-config

Next is to attempt the tests. After adding SDL.dll to the "test"
directory, ./configure fails to find SDL. This was due to (1)
hard-coded prefix in sdl-config, because selected “native”. Setting:
prefix=/usr

fixes one problem. (2) Next was that cp copies the SDL header
files to /usr/include, instead of /usr/include/SDL. So this should
probably be fixed in the “make dist” part of the Makefile.

Moving the header files enables all the test programs to be
successfully compiled. Next, some programs failed when
"SDL_memcmp" wasn’t found at runtime. This I fixed by copying
SDL_config_win32.h to SDL_config.h. After the last fix, all tests
ran properly, I think. SDL_config.h is new compared to the last
MinGW dev version of SDL I installed a long time ago, so I’m not
too sure how I’m supposed to deal with it.–
Cheers,
Kein-Hong Man (esq.)
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

2

This is to Kein-Hong Man: I’m not exactly sure what problem you are having
with SDL and MingGW but i know i had endless hours of problems myself. i
came across this link
http://blog.pantokrator.net/2006/08/08/setting-up-msysmingw-build-system-for-compiling-sdlopengl-applications/and
if you check other entries it has a howto on SDL_image as well. i hope
that helped someone…–
Fear Popo Bawa!!!

3

Hi,

Jake Longworth wrote:

This is to Kein-Hong Man: I’m not exactly sure what problem you are
having with SDL and MingGW but i know i had endless hours of problems
myself. i came across this link
http://blog.pantokrator.net/2006/08/08/setting-up-msysmingw-build-system-for-compiling-sdlopengl-applications/
and if you check other entries it has a howto on SDL_image as well. i
hope that helped someone…

I’m well aware that I can build from sources. It is in the wiki
also, linked to http://www.libsdl.org/extras/win32/gcc.html. I did
say that I got all the tests running nicely using configure. No
problemo. I was just reporting glitches I encountered based on my
notes. Think of it as a “user’s experience” report. :slight_smile:

The issue is, libsdl.org does officially distribute a precompiled
MinGW developer’s package. I’m concerned that the developer’s
package is not working as smoothly as it should be doing, at least
for people using the Makefile and installing with "make native"
and this might disadvantage beginners to the MinGW/msys platform,
who often prefer to grab such precompiled packages.

Anyway, once the glitches are cleared up, the package works
wonderfully. I have also got SDL_image and SDL_mixer running
nicely too. The connection is slightly better today, and I’ve just
managed to grab the SVN 1.2 sources, so I’ll take a closer look
and at the Bugzilla bug list as well.

Thanks,–
Cheers,
Kein-Hong Man (esq.)
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia