What would be the right way to build gawk using this environment?

[janko-jj]

I tried to download gawk and to do ./configure && make and that of course doesn't work, I have no idea what the right way would be to do this.
I just know it's somehow possible as there is gawk built in MSYS2, but I also can't figure out how they do manage to achieve exactly that. I know the whole environment is replicating a lot of the context of cygwin, but I still don't know if or how these specific elements needed for specific applications could (if they could) be set.
It's not that I'm interested exclusively in gawk but I'm asking more to learn what's the right way to do it, in general, for sources like that, if anybody would know, or if it's even possible.
It seems they depend on autotools automake gnulib and maybe something can be skipped but I'm not sure how and what. I seem to come to some point, but then the errors appear. An example of an error I see during the compilation would be

io.c:2497:34: error: ‘SIGKILL’ undeclared (first use in this function); did you mean ‘SIGILL’?

I know it's possible to do anything with enough of hand-patching the sources, but I believe there is already work done to do it "right" for MSYS2 and I just can't find it. I found this

https://github.com/git-for-windows/MSYS2-packages/blob/b6d39f4708da8c9b014797d3dbb4504b204113d8/gawk/0001-Support-building-in-MSYS2.patch

But this doesn't seem to answer the issues I see, or maybe it does? I see MSYS2 there patches some files for some conditions to match it too, which would otherwise match cygwin* or mingw* ? Is that it, and what is actually missing here for w64devkit?

Thanks for any explanations.

[skeeto]

See the gawk manual here:
https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/PC-Compiling.html

Though it's outdated and incomplete. The procedure that works in w46dk right now looks like this:

$ cp pc/* .
$ sed -i /HAVE_STRCASECMP/d config.h
$ make -j gawk.exe CC=gcc O=.o CF="-std=gnu99 -fpermissive -DHAVE_STRNCASECMP -DHAVE_STRCASECMP" OPT=-O2 OBJ=popen.o LNK=LMINGW32 LF= LF2=-lws2_32 RSP= 

sed is to fix a bug in config.h. -std=gnu99 is because it's not C23-compatible. -fpermissive is to work around more bugs in the gawk source that modern compilers no longer tolerate.

[janko-jj]

Amazing it worked! Many thanks!

The complete sequence is:

$ cp pc/* .
$ sed -i /HAVE_STRCASECMP/d config.h
$ cp * ..
$ cd ..
$ make -j gawk.exe CC=gcc O=.o CF="-std=gnu99 -fpermissive -DHAVE_STRNCASECMP -DHAVE_STRCASECMP" OPT=-O2 OBJ=popen.o LNK=LMINGW32 LF= LF2=-lws2_32 RSP= 

After the symbols are stripped, it's just 1281536 bytes.

I did try to use the content of pc folder too, but got stuck with make mingw32 making errors.

That's a nice statically linked gawk, I think the only less-than-ideal aspect is that the gawk extensions (which are dynamically loaded) probably can't work due to non-existence of the dynamic loading infrastructure?

[ghost]

I will steal it from Cygwin instead.

You download Cygwin setup and run this command:

setup-x86_64.exe -q -P gawk

You then in the Cygwin shell run ldd /usr/bin/gawk to find the list of required DLLs (the ones inside your Cygwin installation).

Copy the gawk binary together with these DLLs to the bin directory of your w64devkit and you are done.

You can use the same trick with MSYS2 as the source instead of Cygwin.

[janko-jj]

Who wants to use cygwin binaries would install cygwin,AFAIK this is not the direction that fits the use scenarios that were the motivation for the w64devkit and its use.

[janko-jj]

Thinking more, msys2 dlls and the gawk from should be able to load the gawk extensions however, so it can be the right way for that goal.