Building Epiar on Windows Using MinGW/MSYS

MinGW/MSYS is port of the free (as in price and rights) GNU compiler GCC for Windows. MSYS is an optional extra program that provides a POSIX-like shell environment which makes it easier to run the Unix build scripts that Epiar supports, essentially solving the problem of Windows being the only environment that doesn't have decent POSIX support.

Step One: Download MinGW and MSYS

MinGW: ​http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/mingw/Automated%20MinGW%20Installer/MinGW%205.1.6/MinGW-5.1.6.exe?use_mirror=voxel
MSYS: ​http://downloads.sourceforge.net/mingw/MSYS-1.0.11.exe

Install MinGW first and put it in C:\MINGW . During the MinGW install, make sure you select G++ and the MinGW Make program. Then, run MSYS (rxvt) from your Start Menu. We will do all the following work within the shell that launches from that command.

Step Two: Install the Library Dependencies

Epiar requires a number of basic libraries that a Unix system would have that MSYS does not have. If you follow the instructions presented here precisely (and assuming they're kept up to date), you should be alright to just type in the following and have it work.

Install libxml2

Download the source here: ​ftp://xmlsoft.org/libxml2/libxml2-2.7.6.tar.gz .
You will need to move the sources to this and all future downloads to a place MSYS can see (it runs a sort of virtual environment). That location is something along the lines of C:\msys\1.0\home\Administrator (Administrator would be whatever your username is). Once the file is in that place (your "home directory"), type the following commands:

cd ~
mkdir src
cd src
mv ../libxml* .
tar -xzvf libxml*
cd libxml2-2.7.6
./configure --prefix=/home/Administrator (or whatever your username is)
make && make install