How to use makensis.exe in the MinGW shell with MinGW mounted directories

Jin^eLD
30th August 2013 22:27 UTC

How to use makensis.exe in the MinGW shell with MinGW mounted directories
Hi,

as you may know MinGW shell under WIN32 mounts stuff in the way that you get a Linux style directory layout, i.e. /home/someuser and so on.

Is it possible to make makensis.exe work with these directories? It seems that makensis always looks for absolute windows style paths, i.e. c:\mingw\msys\1.0\home\someuser

The reason why I am asking:

I have a project that compiles under MinGW, the configure script processes my nsi file automatically and inserts package version, location of compiled binaries that should go into the installer and so on.

However, since the build system runs within the MinGW environment, all paths are "local" MinGW paths, i.e. /home/someuser and so on.

My goal was to integrate makensis.exe into the build so that I'd simply run "make installer" to get what I need. However, makensis refuses to work with those paths and insists on c:\xxx

I even compiled nsis under MinGW, hoping that it would pick up the "local" layout, but that did not help.

Using nsis-3.0a1

Kind regards,
Jin

Anders
31st August 2013 18:33 UTC

Does it work if you use relative paths in the script?

Jin^eLD
31st August 2013 18:46 UTC

Originally posted by Anders
Does it work if you use relative paths in the script?

I guess it would, however my problem is that I do not know the relative path to the installation directory in this scenario, I only have the absolute "mingw" version of the path.

Right now I implmented a workaround where I would cd to the mingw path and issue a pwd -W which will return the windows path, and then use that to process the nsi. It works, however I'd be still interested to know if there is a way to make nsis use the mingw paths.