On 29 August 2010 18:06, Brandon S Allbery KF8NH
DLLs can be put into C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 or equivalent (e.g. Windows NT liked to install itself in C:\WINNT instead of C:\WINDOWS). LIB files are less standard and I'm under the impression that every IDE uses its own notion of where to put them (and may not use the registry in a non-opaque way).
BTW, if there *is* some standard registry tree that can be used for this, it should be possible to provide a Windows version of pkg-config that would hide most of this. Replacing autoconf is harder, though it might be possible to work from configure.in (or even configure.am when automake is involved).
Windows has a standard place for header files <path-to-MinGW>\MinGW\include Similary for .a's and .o's: <path-to-MinGW>\MinGW\lib For "/usr/local" installs the path is: <path-to-msys>\msys\1.0\local with bin, include, lib and share comfortably placed in local. ./configure && make && make install will do the right thing for installing source packages. Binary packages are available from MinGW's repository. Its a defacto standard, but its still a standard. If people are using Cygwin or Microsoft's Unix compatibility layer, Visual C or even the parts of MinGW distributed with GHC, they aren't documenting their successes so no-one else can follow them, for all intents and purposes MinGW/Msys is the only game in town. [Caveat - Cygwin is fine for developing if you just want a good shell and aren't working with FFI bindings].