OCaml 3.11 on MinGW

OCaml 3.11 on MinGW

[Matthieu Wipliez]

Dear OCaml users,

I would just like to share with you my experience of compiling OCaml 3.11 with MinGW and Minimal SYStem (MSYS).

I had to set the FLEXLINKFLAGS environment variable to have OCaml compile successfully:
  export FLEXLINKFLAGS="-nocygpath -L C:\MinGW\lib"
(note that I installed MinGW in the default folder C:\MinGW)

Indeed, the documentation states that flexdll will call cygpath to solve paths, and cygpath is not available under MSYS.
The -L was needed so that flexdll could find libraries.

Apart from that, the usual (1) copy configuration files (2) make world, opt, opt.opt, install
went smoothly.

I now have a functional OCaml, with a MSYS twice as small as the equivalent Cygwin installation, and compilation goes at least twice as fast with MSYS.

So... my questions are the following:
  - what is the "official" status of OCaml on MinGW/MSYS? The README.win32 still says that only Cygwin may be used, but that appears not to be the case anymore.
  - did I miss something with flexdll? Are those extra flags always necessary with MinGW/MSYS, or is there a different way?

Cheers,
Matthieu

Re: [Caml-list] OCaml 3.11 on MinGW

[Alain Frisch]

Matthieu Wipliez wrote:
>   - did I miss something with flexdll? Are those extra flags always necessary with MinGW/MSYS, or is there a different way?

I believe the -nocygpath is not necessary. If cygpath is not available, 
flexdll will simply not use it.

-- Alain