This collection of files is part of the sdunio environment on Windows systems. It contains the bare minimum of command line tools needed to run the build process either from the IDE or using a Makefile.
If you already have a working command line environment set up using tools like mingw or cygwin you can use that and there is no need to install these files here.
I didn't write any of the tools contained in this repository. The only purpose of this compilation is to save you some work downloading them separately.
This used to be a collection of msys2 tools. After some changes in the building process and streamlining the used scripts it was possible to replace them all by busybox and make.
Just copy the two files busybox.exe and make.exe into a location in your
%PATH.
Is still available in the mingw branch of this repository.
busybox.exe is straight from the busybox-w32 project, version FRP-2358.
make.exe is compiled as a 32 bit binary from the official sources at the GNU Make site using mingw on a Linux host system. Here is how to do it on a Mint 19 (Ubuntu 18.04 based) system.
Install the required packages:
apt install mingw-w64 mingw-w64-tools
Download the source code from the GNU ftp server, unpack, enter that directory.
./configure --host=i686-w64-mingw32
make INCLUDES=-I$(pwd)/glob
strip make.exe
That's it. Ready to go.
It works, but using the Arduino.mk makefile with Windows is slow. There is no easy fix, the underlying problem is a fundamental one. It is not about the compilation itself, it is the way Makefiles are written and executed. The whole concept relies on forking subprocesses for all the shell calls. Unfortunately, there is nothing like a fork in Windows and to work around that is painfully slow.
Using busybox is already a huge improvement over using msys2 as now all tools are part of the busybox binary and can be started much easier.
It might be possible to use the new Linux-Subsystem of Windows 10 instead. (Feedback highly appreciated)