Compiling PDCurses on Windows with MinGW

Question

I'm getting the weirdest error when I do ./configure when building nmcurses-5.9

The issue is when I try to run

CC="gcc -m32" LD="ld -m32" ./configure \
--prefix=/mingw \
--without-cxx-binding \
--without-ada \
--enable-warnings \
--enable-assertions \
--enable-reentrant \
--with-debug \
--with-normal \
--disable-home-terminfo \
--enable-sp-funcs \
--enable-term-driver \
--enable-interop \
--with-pthread

and the error I get is

./configure: line 21016: D:\Program: No such file or directory

on that line is

${MAKE:-make} preinstall

I am building this in MinGW using msys. any help would be apreciated.

Answer 1

In ${MAKE:-make} preinstall, the expression ${MAKE:-make} expands to the value of the shell variable MAKE, if it is set, and otherwise to make.

So MAKE is set and expands to something probably of the form D:\Program Files\..., i.e. a path with embedded spaces, which is construed as distinct tokens D:\Program and Files\... by the shell when attempting to execute the intended command:

\path\to\make preinstall

Instead it attempts to execute a program D:\Program with arguments Files\... preinstall and complains that no such program exists.

With GNU autotools is advisable to install tools in paths that are free of embedded spaces.