[CMake] Finding libs/headers on MSYS/MinGW

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Kai Sterker wrote:
> On 9/27/06, Brad King <brad.king at kitware.com> wrote:
>
>> I'm not sure this is a bug.  The msys prefix has special meaning only
>> for some native msys tools.  The fact that you have chosen to install
>> other things there is no different than installing them in
>> c:/my/random/path (I think, but I'm not an MSYS expert).
>
> Neither am I. For me it acts as a cygwin replacement, so I did what I
> would have done there. (Installing stuff to /usr/local). I don't know
> whether that's common practice among MSYS users, as I discovered MSYS
> just recently.

MSYS is a hybrid world.  It is *not* meant to be a Cygwin environment or 
Cygwin replacement.  The authors of MSYS are expressly against this 
happening.  MSYS is supposed to be used for building Windows native 
apps, which then are expected to run in places like C:\Program 
Files\MyApp, or under a Windows Command Prompt without any further 
involvement from MSYS.  Really, MSYS is meant to be whatever is 
necessary to get a GCC toolchain to work under Windows and produce 
native Windows apps.

But the reality is, a lot of open source code moves from the Linux world 
to the MinGW / MSYS world.  Things like SDL, libpng, zlib, libjpg, etc.  
There's tons and tons of this stuff if you sip at that trough.  People 
do install all these library dependencies in /usr/local.   Now, what 
people actually do to ship their apps, I'm not sure.  Chicken Scheme 
doesn't have any dependencies on anything, so I really haven't tested 
out this issue.

What I'm saying is, some people use MSYS as its designers intend, and 
some people use it as a pseudo-Unix.  So both cultures are present.  I'd 
say it's reasonable to search /usr/local for stuff.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every