FTGL and MinGW - How in the third moon of Saturn are you meant to compile this thing?

Question

Ok, I'm trying to get FTGL working on MinGW, and I am having trouble compiling the library.

I google searched everywhere, tried many different things, the closest thing to getting it work correctly is this question, however, he is assuming you can compile the library... the very step I am having trouble with.

Ok, so I am using MinGW with Code::Blocks, and I can run an OpenGL + GLUT program, it compiles and runs fine.

I'm not very experienced with compiling libraries, so please be gentle.

So, FTGL doesn't use CMake, it uses ./configure, make, make install... and I saw the different configure.??? and Makefile.??? files, which I figured out where used with autoconf and automake, I believe. So I tried downloading these, there is no executable to point my PATH environment variable at, so I figured out they use Python...

Now the Python shell I can't seem to get that to the right place to run the ./configure command. Somehow I feel like I'm going in the wrong direction.

Well, that is all too hard, maybe MSYS has the auto tools built in? Well, if it does, I can't navigate to the source files for the library and can't find autoconf and can't find automake.

All I want to do is compile FTGL in MinGW. Can somebody please help me?

Answer 1

I was facing the same problem some weeks ago. I ended up using a custom Makefile, not that convenient but pretty doable since FTGL is not that huge.

if found those two links very helpful:

• Instruction and sample Makefile
  i was able to use the Makefile provided there with very little modification
• Adaption of FTGL header files