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CDT Toolchain discovery (MinGW) [message #508088]

Fri, 15 January 2010 15:24

jobieg
Messages: 2
Registered: January 2010

Junior Member

Just out of curiosity: CDT seems to try to discover installed toolchains automatically (at eclipse startup?). How does it do it?

I've installed MinGW (5.1.6) and MSYS (1.0.10) to use it with Eclipse CDT (6.0) on Windows 7, following exactly the instructions in the help in "Before you begin". Everything worked fine after that but I noticed that the MinGW installation did not modify the path and also did not add any environment variables. Despite this, CDT worked nicely and detected the mingw toolchain.

Recently I had to rollback my system partition to a state before the MinGW and MSYS installation. That is, now MinGW and MSYS folders and files are still there (and both tools can of course be used if set properly in the path) but now CDT does not detect the toolchain automatically anymore. Does CDT rely on some registry key? Clearly it cannot use the path.

Regards
hjb

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Re: CDT Toolchain discovery (MinGW) [message #508091 is a reply to message #508088]

Fri, 15 January 2010 15:44

Doug Schaefer
Messages: 62
Registered: July 2009

Member

The CDT does try to look for MinGW at known locations. One of them you are running into is probably the registry (based on the MinGW uninstall info). We do default to C:\MinGW if everything else fails so I assume that's not where you installed it.

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Re: CDT Toolchain discovery (MinGW) [message #508751 is a reply to message #508088]

Wed, 20 January 2010 02:44

No real name
Messages: 2
Registered: January 2010

Junior Member

How can I change the location where Eclipse looks for MinGW for a toolchain? Can I set some environment variable in a workspace?

I am using two installations of Eclipse and two different workspaces, one with a plugin environment which requires older version of mingw-gcc (3.4.5) and another in which I use the latest versions of gcc and gdb. I have two MinGW installations in different directories for this purpose.

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Re: CDT Toolchain discovery (MinGW) [message #508756 is a reply to message #508088]

Wed, 20 January 2010 03:38

jobieg
Messages: 2
Registered: January 2010

Junior Member

Yes I would also like to know how to do that. Setting a MINGW environment variable does not seem to have an effect. My current workaround, based on Doug's hint about the standard MinGW location, is to create an NTFS junction point at C:\MinGW that points to the directory of the MinGW version that I intend to use. However, that's not an option if you need to switch back and forth between versions I guess.

Frankly, although automatic toolchain detection may be useful, I'd rather prefer a simple configuration dialogue in the C/C++ preferences. Similar to how Java developers can add JDK entries manually or select the one they'd like to use from detected installations.

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Re: CDT Toolchain discovery (MinGW) [message #508774 is a reply to message #508088]

Wed, 20 January 2010 04:50

No real name
Messages: 2
Registered: January 2010

Junior Member

I figured out that one place where eclipse looks for MinGW installation is in registry key HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Min GW\InstallLocation.

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Re: CDT Toolchain discovery (MinGW) [message #520060 is a reply to message #508088]

Wed, 10 March 2010 20:07

Michael
Messages: 2
Registered: July 2009

Junior Member

For the life of my i can't figure out why Eclipse cannot see my MinGW installation. I installed it using the automated windows installer and changed no settings. I checked the registry location mentioned, but it doesn't exist.

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Re: CDT Toolchain discovery (MinGW) [message #520064 is a reply to message #520060]

Wed, 10 March 2010 21:17

Andrew Gvozdev
Messages: 239
Registered: July 2009

Senior Member

You may want to try most recent CDT 7.0 build from http://download.eclipse.org/tools/cdt/builds/. There were some improvements how MinGW toolchain is discovered, see https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=195572

Andrew

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