After releasing Cherokee 0.8.0, it is time to take care of a broken promise. It is time to give some love to our native Win32 port.

This subject has been a little bit of a pain. We have spent on this way much more time than what we should have because of the building environment. Well, actually, because of the lack of a bundle with the set of tools needed to compile an autotool based project on Windows.

Both Taher and me have spent a lot of time trying to get an acceptable building environment that we could use for keeping up with periodic Win32 binary releases, although none our tries were really fruitful. We found a whole lot of problems along the way: outdated versions of autoconf/automake/libtool that broke up when they were updated, weird 'make' issues, missing parameter in m4, etc.

However, I have finally found a path to get it working! (Hopefully it is actually true, not like the last time I said the same and I ended up proving myself wrong). Here is the cookbook:

• Download MinGW-5.1.4. Install it in c:\mingw

• Download Msys-1.0.10. Install it in c:\msys\1.0. Then: y, y, c:/mingw

• Download MsysDTK-1.0.1. Install it with the default values.

• Then you will have to go to SourceForge and download a few updates from the User Contributed: mingwPORT (current) section: autoconf-2.59-mingwPORT, automake-1.9.5-mingwPORT, libtool-1.5.22-mingwPORT, wget-1.9.1-mingwPORT, emacs-cvs-mingwPORT.

  These aren't actually packages, but scripts that download and compile updated versions of some tools, so it will require a little bit of time to get them installed.

  In the average case, it's trivial to install these packages. However, there are a couple of exceptions you should know about. The first one is wget; to get it installed open a shell and execute the following commands:

  mkdir /usr/src ; cd /usr/src
  tar xfvj ~/wget-1.9.1-mingwPORT.tar.bz2
  cp wget-1.9.1/mingwPORT/wget.exe /mingw/bin/

  The second exception is the autoconf update. Right after unpacking the package in /usr/src you will have to edit the mingwPORT/mingwPORT.configure file, and change:

  ${SRCDIR}/configure --prefix=`cd ${PREFIX} && pwd -W`

  by:

  ${SRCDIR}/configure --prefix="${PREFIX}"

  Then you can go ahead and execute ./mingwPORT.sh in order to get it compiled and installed (use the default values).

  For the rest of the packages, you will only need to unpack them and execute mingwPORT.sh.

• The next step is quite tricky. We will have to fix a broken aclocal script by hand. It is really easy though, just open a terminal and type:

  cd /mingw/bin
  mv aclocal aclocal.orig
  sed s.C:/./C/.g aclocal.orig > aclocal

• At this point, we will have a fairly acceptable environment, although it will still lack a few more software pieces. Next step is to install the Pthreads library and header by downloading the latest release, unpacking it and executing:

  cp -r Pre-built.2/{include,lib} /mingw/

• Then SVN. In my case I used svn-1.4.6 because I could not download the 1.5.1 Win32 client binaries without registering at CollabNet.. which kind of pissed me off.

• The last missing piece of software was Python. So after installing it and adding the SVN and Python paths to the PATH environment variable we will be done.

So, now that I have finally found the way to collect, set up and fix all the little pieces involved on the compilation environment I can finally start working on the real stuff. <sigh!>