how to install gengetopt on cygwin

Question

I have some C code originally developed on linux, which makes use of gengetopts to parse the command line. I also want to build that code on cygwin.

(On linux I simply did "apt-get install gengetopt" and everything was fine.

I don't find any package that looks like gengetopt on cygwin, so I try to build from source as per the instructions.

But when I try:

sh ./configure.ac

I first get an error that I have to fix with dos2unix, and then this:

$ sh ./configure.ac
./configure.ac: line 18: dnl: command not found
./configure.ac: line 19: syntax error near unexpected token `GNU'
./configure.ac: line 19: `AC_INIT(GNU gengetopt,2.23)'

The relevant lines in the config file are:

dnl Process this file with autoconf to produce a configure script.
AC_INIT(GNU gengetopt,2.23)

I did make sure that autoconf, bison, flex and m4 are installed. The default shell in cygwin seems to be bash. What is the problem? what is "dnl" - seems to be a linux built in. If so why is it not part of cygwin?

Is there an easier way to do this? it all looks like a bit of a compatibility mess. Is it generally this hard to install packages on cygwin?

Answer 1

After some trial and error, I did manage this. Here is what was needed:

1. Use the cygwin installer to install autoconf, automake, libtool, bison, flex
2. Download the tar.gz (instead of using git clone) from here
3. ./configure

4. make failed with a compilation issue (this was getopt 2.22). I had to add:

   #include "string.h"

into src/fileutils.cpp - after this make succeeded.

5. Note that on cugwin it seems you don't need to be root to install manually. Simple "make install" worked fine.

I now seem to have a working gengetopt on cygwin.

EDIT : in fact 2.23 is the latest version, and in this version there is no compilation problem.