Struggling with compilation of pidgin for windows

[Daniel Atallah]

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 17:44, Kontostathis, April
<akontostathis at ursinus.edu> wrote:
> I followed the instructions here:
>
> http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/BuildingWinPidgin
>
> Which was non-trivial because the mingw links all take me to some high level
> directory that I needed to drill into to find what I thought was the right
> file to download/install/use.

Really?  I just checked the links and they all appear to be find for me.
When did you try this?  There was a period of time when the links were
broken due to sourceforge changes, but that was 4 months ago.

>  My current directory structure appears to be
> correct, but when I try to compile, I get:

<SNIP>

> Further investigation revealed that just trying to compile something with
> gcc.exe (which is currently pointing to)
>
> $ which gcc.exe
>
> /cygdrive/c/devel/pidgin-devel/win32-dev/mingw/bin/gcc.exe
>

(It seems like something is missing from your message here.)

>
> Gets completely ignored (no errors, no compilation output either).
>  However, the libpurple.dll was created and if I reset my path to use the
> cygwin gcc (from /usr/bin) I can get it to compile, but it dies further down
> the road (probably when it tries to make a dll).

You don't want to use the cygwin gcc.  Was your compilation output
above produced with the cygwin gcc?
You will want to `make -f Makefile.mingw clean` in the root pidgin
directory to make sure that you get rid of any cygwin-dependent
objects - mixing stuff like that is only going to be a source of
problems.

>
> Any insight would be appreciated.
>

It's kind of hard to guess what might be wrong because there isn't any
particular error message in the output you posted.
My best guess is that you've missed one of the mingw pieces or
something like that.

What does `gcc -v` output?

Have you tried manually compiling a test C source file directly with gcc?

-D