[Qgis-developer] Building QGIS with MinGW

[John Buonagurio]

Hi all,

I am working on compiling QGIS for Windows under a MinGW environment - my program links with R so unfortunately I can't use the MSVC toolchain. I've successfully built the CMake targets core, ui, gui and providers on release-1_7_4 branch on Git, but had a couple problems with dependencies. I am using the Qt 4.8.4 binary distribution (qt-win-opensource-4.8.4-mingw.exe) and MinGW with gcc 4.4.0. Primary things to note are:

 - Make sure SETUPAPI_LIBRARY is set to MinGW/lib/libsetupapi.a - CMake may assign C:/WINDOWS/system32/setupapi.dll by default.
 - The GnuWin32 versions of Flex and Bison did not work. Fortunately, someone has finally ported over the latest versions to Win32 without dependencies on the MSYS DLLs! The latest version of the files located here worked well: http://sourceforge.net/projects/winflexbison/

I've successfully linked against the libraries and I'm running a simple QgsMapCanvas-based demo application - thanks Tim Sutton for the excellent tutorials.

I would like to move to release-1.8 or trunk but the only thing preventing me from doing so is the dependency of core on libspatialindex. I can't get it to build with MinGW; has anyone successfully managed to do so and could you give me any tips? I can post the complete build log on request.

Thanks,
John