depext cygwin

depext-cygwinports provides all functions that are necessary in order to support opam-depext under cygwin. The installation of external libraries (like pcre, gtk2, or gmp) is very convenient this way.

depext-cygwinports will also install a wrapper for pkg-config inside $(opam config var bin). pkg-config is available as either i686-w64-mingw32-pkg-config or x86_64-w64-mingw32-pkg-config under cygwin and most build instructions will just look for pkg-config.

Preparation

• Add /usr/i686-w64-mingw32/sys-root/mingw/bin or /usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32/sys-root/mingw/bin to your $PATH (in front of /usr/bin, not after it!). The cygwin maintainer use this convention to avoid name clashes. There is for example one curl-config script at /usr/bin (for cygwin’s version of libcurl that is linked against cygwin1.dll), one in /usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32/sys-root/mingw/bin (64-bit native windows) and one in /usr/i686-w64-mingw32/sys-root/mingw/bin. The dlls at /usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32/sys-root/mingw/bin and /usr/i686-w64-mingw32/sys-root/mingw/bin usually also have identical names. Therefore you have to configure your PATH manually. (As an alternative you can use eval $(ocaml-env cygwin) instead of eval $(opam config env), see ocaml-env)

• Install depext-cygwinports with:

opam install depext depext-cygwinports

Usage

Now you can use opam depext in the same way as under linux. The following command for example will install OCaml-Top including all dependencies (gtk2, gtksourceview, etc.):

opam depext -i ocaml-top

Caveats

• depext-cygwinports won’t work in multiuser contexts - you need write access to your root directory of cygwin. If you use the graphical installer and start it as normal user, the installer will configure it correct for you. If you want to install additonal cygwin packages later or update your installation, start cygwin’s setup with cygwin-install gui (cygwin-install is the wrapper installed by depext-cygwinports, it will call cygwin’s setup with the right parameters for you).
  And by the way, you can create multiple, independent cygwin installations without any problems. Every user could create its own version, it would just waste disk space.
• depext-cygwinports is a misnomer at the moment. Yaakov Selkowitz recently moved all relevant packages from his repository (‘cygwinports’) to the main repository. The latest release of depext-cygwinports therefore does not longer install any packages from cygwinports. But this might change again in the future.