Re: [Mingw-msys] Default install location for CMake

[Cesar Strauss <cestrauss@xxxxxxxxx>]

Bill Hoffman wrote:
> 
> Just to be clear it is easy for both developers to change what the 
> default is for a package, and for end users to change the default if 
> they are building a package.  The only questions here, is what should 
> the default be for CMake when creating makefiles for msys.
> 
> My feeling from reading the web pages of msys leads me to think that the 
> msys developers do not want msys to be something like cygwin where you 
> build a bunch of posix applications that run out of msys directories. 
> They want msys to be the minimal set of tools to allow the use of the 
> GNU tool chain.  However, it would seem that many projects that use msys 
> are using /usr/local as an install root.  Those projects are essentially 
> extending the msys environment.  With cygwin the answer is clear, 
> applications should behave just like they do on linux (i.e. use 
> /usr/local as the install root).  Those applications will also 
> understand POSIX paths and mount points because they link to the cygwin 
> runtime.  With MSYS, it is not so clear.
> 
> Let's say someone was going to write a makefile to compile a program 
> with msys not using autotools, what would be the recommended location 
> for the install prefix?
> 
> -Bill
> 

I would choose /usr/local, because it is the most flexible. With a 
simple edit of /etc/fstab, one could point /usr/local to be the same as 
c:\mingw, or even %ProgramFiles%/program_name. In that sense, by 
installing in /usr/local, I am not necessarily extending the MSYS 
environment in any way, as inferred.

I personally use MSYS to help porting some free software applications I 
am interested in to Windows. Now, one of the great things about free 
software is code reuse. This means, however, that I have to compile and 
install some libraries the program depends upon, first. Call me lazy, 
but what I currently do is to install all dependencies (and the 
dependencies' dependencies) in one place, c:\mingw, so the compiler 
finds them easily, and so I don't have to keep updating PATH, CXXFLAGS, 
LDFLAGS and PKG_CONFIG_PATH, among others. In that way, what I am really 
want is to extend the MinGW gcc compiler in c:\mingw with these 
additional libraries, so I can build the main program in the first place.

So, my preferred install location for libraries is c:\mingw. /usr/local 
is also acceptable, as long as it points to c:\mingw in /etc/fstab.

For standalone applications, I don't use %ProgramFiles% at all, it gets 
too cluttered. I like to organize my installed applications like this:

c:\programs\program_category\program_name

Regards,
Cesar


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