A note on Windows/MinGW support

Now you can compile Gauche to use MinGW runtime library
(see http://www.mingw.org/ ), so that the produced binary can
be easily distributed.

Because of the difference of the underlying system, not all
system-related procedures are available on MinGW port.
The reference manual tells whether a particular procedure
is supported on "Windows native"---meaning MinGW or WinVC version.

[Compilation]

To compile MinGW version from the source tarball, you need MSYS
environment in order to run 'configure'.   (You don't need MSYS to
run the compiled Gauche.)

If you try to build from svn source, you also need a running
Gauche. Grab one of the precompiled mingw binary, or first build
and install Gauche from the tarball.

The following MinGW libraries are also recommended, although
you can build Gauche without them.   They don't come with MinGW
itself.  You have to download the precompiled tarballs from
the MinGW download site and untar them under c:\mingw (or
the directory you installed MinGW.)

- MinGW libiconv
    Required to make gauche.charconv fully functional.
    You need libiconv-dll, libiconv-dev, libcharset-dll.
- MinGW zlib
    Required to make rfc.zlib.
    You need libz-dll and libz-dev.

(Note: You'll find MSYS {libiconv,zlib} and MinGW {libiconv,zlib}
on the dowlonad site; make sure you download MinGW version.)

Gdbm doesn't work straightforwardly, since there's no official
MinGW port of gdbm.  MSYS-gdbm does NOT work.  You may be
able to compile gdbm from source on MinGW (you need some patches;
look for them the Net.  It is also said that you have to configure
it with --disable-shared.)  Once you have MinGW gdbm installed,
Gauche's 'configure' will find it and builds dbm.gdbm etc,
though some test errors result.

[Installtaion and packaging]

If you want to run the mingw version of Gauche on the same
machine you compile it, probably it is easier to give
--prefix=/mingw to 'configure'.

If you want to copy compiled Gauche to the machine where
mingw might not exist, you need to include mingw DLL 
(and zlib DLL if you compiled with zlib).  There's a
convenience shell script in src/mingw-dist.sh.   Just run
it on the top of the Gauche source directory, and it will
create a directory ../Gauche-mingw-dist and installs compiled
Gauche into it, with MinGW dlls.
