This document explains how to build Visual-MinGW sources.

0. Requirements:

Last MinGW distribution or at least latest Windows API package. (w32api)

For more information, follow the troubleshooting steps further in this page.
 

1. Vmdeps

Vmdeps is a renamed makedepend.exe from xfree86 project. It's the dependency generator that Visual-MinGW uses.

From the File menu, click Open Project..., browse to "Visual-MinGW\Projects\vmingw\local\vmdepend" and load "makedepend.vmp".
In the Build menu, click Build to compile the project.

Then click Project/Explore and run install.bat.
 

2. WinUI

WinUI is the C++ library that Visual-MinGW uses.
From the File menu, click Open Project..., browse to "Visual-MinGW\Projects\vmingw\local\winui" and load "winui.vmp".
In the Build menu, click Build to compile the project.

From the project explorer, open "install.bat", modify MinGW's lib and include paths accordingly, for example "D:\Msys\1.0\mingw\lib" and "D:\Msys\1.0\mingw\include\wui" click Format/Convert/DOS.
Save the file.

Click Project/Explore and run install.bat.

Check that all files were copied in "install.log" and in the target directories before continuing.
 

3. Build Visual-MinGW

Load "vmingw.vmp" from "Visual-MinGW\Projects\vmingw\local" and click Build.

Building Visual-MinGW.
The Log View details all command lines passed while compiling and linking.

4. Running Visual-MinGW

From the Compiler results dialog or Build menu, click Run.

When first run, since the ini file isn't created yet, you'll see the installation steps again, this time you can ignore and just click "Cancel" as the newly created instance of Visual-MinGW will inherits of the main instance's environment variables.

One major difference though, is that you need to allow  a second instance of the application to run. When the Preferences dialog will show  up, select the general tab and disable the Single Instance option.

The Single Instance option needs to be disabled
in order for Visual-MinGW to run itself.

Visual-MinGW 0.55 runs Visual-MinGW 0.56.
 

5. Troubleshooting

Compilation errors might indicate that you need a recent version of Windows API package or that you need to patch your MinGW headers.

- Check the version of your w32api package
Open "MinGW\include\_mingw.h" and search version macros, for example:

#define __MINGW32_VERSION 3.1
#define __MINGW32_MAJOR_VERSION 3
#define __MINGW32_MINOR_VERSION 1

The w32api version above is 3.1.

- Install Windows API
Get the distribution from MinGW project. Unpack the archive into your MinGW directory.
New files must overwrite old ones, so you must ensure that the target directory is correct when extracting files.

- Check if you need to patch your headers
This happens when some changes were submitted to MinGW developers, meanwhile a new release of w32api is available.
Patches are stored in "Visual-MinGW\Projects\vmingw\local\patches\w32api" or "local\patches\w32api" in the cvs repository.
Copy the diff file to your "MinGW" directory, then from an Unix shell, "cd" to that directory and run GNU patch.
Remove the patch from MinGW directory.

Patching MinGW headers, "--dry-run" permits to test the patch without changing target files.
 

(Note that you can revert changes with the "-R" option, example "patch -R -dinclude -p1 -i../w32api.diff")