Why does building liblzma fail with "cannot find the library"?

Question

I installed mingw from their website. I installed the developer package which comes with iconv and intl, msys and all the other stuff.

I run ./configure and then make install. While linking, it prints:

 ../../src/liblzma/liblzma.la  -lintl
libtool: link: cannot find the library `/home/keith/staged/mingw32/lib/libiconv.
la' or unhandled argument `/home/keith/staged/mingw32/lib/libiconv.la'
make[2]: *** [xzdec.exe] Error 1

I have no clue who keith is or why it looks there for the library.. I tried settings CCFLAGS CXXFLAGS and LDFLAGS to my include and library folder /usr/local/lib

No cigar.. any ideas why this is happening and how I can fix it?

Answer 1

This is a known problem with the MinGW gettext package. Keith Marshall, the "keith" in question, explains a bit about what's going on in a bug report on the MinGW SourceForge site.

A rather ugly workaround is to actually create a /home/keith/staged/mingw32 folder, then add symlinks to the necessary folders in /mingw, i.e.:

mkdir -p /home/keith/staged/mingw32
cd $_
ln -s /mingw/bin bin
ln -s /mingw/lib lib

(Note that if /mingw doesn't exist in your filesystem, you can create it by adding this line to the bottom of /etc/fstab:

C:/MinGW                /mingw

assuming, of course, you have MingW installed in C:\MinGW. Close the terminal window and re-run msys.bat for the change to take effect.)

You'll then need to download libiconv.la from a person who has conveniently prepared the file, and copy it to /home/keith/staged/mingw32/lib/.

It's a terrible hack, but it worked for me.

Answer 2

According to this bug report, there is something wrong with the latest gettext package (gettext-0.18.3.2).

I've tried the following 2 ways. It seems both working well.

• Remove bad files

  pushd /mingw/lib/ && rm libasprintf.la libgettextlib.la libgettextpo.la libgettextsrc.la libintl.la && popd

  Or you can just rename them. In fact, you will see /home/keith/... in these *.la files if you open them with text editors.

• Use gettext-0.18.3.1 package

  Close MSYS and run the following command to use the older version: mingw-get upgrade "gettext=0.18.3.1-1*" , with PATH=C:\mingw\bin;%PATH%, of course.