25.3 Writing A Cygwin Friendly Package

One approach to using the Cygwin support offered by GNU Autotools in your own package is to have an eye towards having it compile nicely on Unix and on Windows, or indeed of tweaking the configuration of existing packages which use GNU Autotools but which do not compile under Cygwin, or do not behave quite right after compilation. There are several things you need to be aware of in order to design a package to work seamlessly under Cygwin, and yet several more if portability to DOS and (non-Cygwin) Windows is important too. We discussed many of these issues in 15.3.5 Unix/Windows Issues. In this section, we will expand on those issues with ways in which GNU Autotools can help deal with them.

If you only need to build executables and static libraries, then Cygwin provides an environment close enough to Unix that any packages which ship with a relatively recent configuration will compile pretty much out of the box, except for a few peculiarites of Windows which are discussed throughout the rest of this section. If you want to build a package which has not been maintained for a while, and which consequently uses an old Autoconf, then it is usually just a matter of removing the generated files, rebootstrapping the package with the installed (up to date!) Autoconf, and rerunning the `configure' script. On occasion some tweaks will be needed in the `configure.in' to satisfy the newer autoconf, but autoconf will almost always diagnose these for you while it is being run.