how to identify whether mingw compiled library with success

Question

i'm tackling the problem of compiling vmime library using this guide with MinGW. As this guide states, first i need to compile libiconv library with these commands(yep i'm new to MinGW):

$ tar -xvvzf libiconv-1.13.1.tar.gz

$ cd ./libiconv-1.13.1

$ ./configure --prefix=/mingw #configures makefile, use /mingw as a prefix

$ make

$ make install

after all this commands the libiconv.dll.a appears in libiconv-1.13.1\lib.libs directory.Also after compiling process appears the /bin directory and there is only 1 library - libcharset-1.dll.

My question is - how do i know if the library properly compiled, without errors?Should i check the output from the MSYS console? there are tons of checks, it seems pretty boring task. Thanks in advance, glad to hear any advice!

Answer 1

You're building a GNU Autotools package.

./configure generates the makefile(s) needed by make to build the library on your particular system. If it thinks the library can't be built on your particular system, it will tell you why. It might just miss some reason why you can't build the library, because the library developer(s) have to script the tests that it runs, and might just overlook some necessary ones. But if it misses something then make will fail.

make executes all the commands necessary to build the library on your system. If any of them fail, then make will fail, and will tell you so unmistakably.

Likewise make install does everything necessary to install the library under the default or specified prefix path.

Classically, unix tools (like the autootols) will inform you when something goes wrong and not inform you that nothing went wrong.