Problem building Pidgin.

[Gary Kramlich]

On 5/5/21 11:16 AM, DAVID MAY wrote:
> I also tried building Pidgin 2.14.4 with MSYS2. Documentation, such as
> it is, assumes a Cygwin environment but suggests MSYS (not MSYS2) can be
> used with "tweaks" to the build scripts.

You need a win32-dev directory that contains all of our dependencies.
The easiest way to get that right now is from
https://data.imfreedom.org/pidgin/win32-dev.7z

> Anyway running configure results in the following error:
> 
> ...
> checking for inet_aton... no
> checking for inet_aton in -lresolv... no
> configure: error: inet_aton not found

Pidgin 2 on windows doesn't use autotools.  You build it using `make -f
Makefile.mingw` in the root of the source code.

> Looking at the Pidgin 2.14.4 source code there are multiple bare
> inet_aton() calls - with no #ifdefs nor macro magic to substitute a
> Win32 alternative.
> 
> Which suggests there is no way this thing is going to build with MSYS2.

There's a bunch of nonsense in pidgin2 that makes this work, serious you
don't want to dig into it and we replaced most if not all of it in
pidgin 3 already.

> The reason I tried building Pidgin 3.0 is that the documentation, such
> as it is, claims to build with MSYS2 - and indeed a talkatu standalone
> project does build cleanly out of the box even though the Pidgin project
> fails to build a talkatu sub-project.

Pidgin3 under msys2 currently requires msys2 packages and will not be
distribute-able outside of msys2.  We're working on a solution for that,
but limited resources makes that difficult.

Thanks,

--
Gary Kramlich <grim at pidgin.im>