By default, qpdf builds on UNIX and UNIX-like systems with simple
./configure; make; make install comamnds.  It ordinarily uses libtool
to build libraries and link executables.

As an alternative, the build system can use its own built-in rules.
The available build rules can be found in the make directory; all the
files except rules.mk are build rules.  The gcc-linux rules are there
primarily for testing the build system.  They are not intended to be
used in production since, in a Linux environment, it's better to use
the default libtool rules.

For building on Windows, autoconf and libtool don't generate a working
build for either mingw (as of this writing) or MS Visual C++.  We use
our own rules instead.  In addition, the external dependencies (pcre
and zlib) are often not present on Windows systems.

If you have MSYS and Mingw installed, you can run configure as follows:

./configure --disable-test-compare-images --enable-build-external-libs --with-buildrules=mingw

To build with msvc, you must be running in a shell environment that
puts the MSVC tools in your path.  Then you can run

XXX WHAT?

./configure --disable-test-compare-images --enable-build-external-libs --with-buildrules=msvc

From there, run

make

at the top level directory to build everything.  Building with mingw
from a cygwin environment is not likely to work.  However, you have to
have a cygwin environment to run the test suite.  Once you have built
qpdf using mingw, you can test as follows:

From your MSYS environment:

 * Run objdump qpdf/build/qpdf.exe | grep DLL

 * Copy the gcc runtime DLL into libqpdf/build

From a Cygwin environment:

 * Add the full path libqpdf/build to your path

 * Run

   make check GENDEPS=0

This will run the qtest-based test suite, which requires cygwin.  You
need perl, gnu diffutils, and basic shell commands.

As of this writing, the image comparison tests confuse ghostscript in
cygwin, but there's a chance they might work at some point.  If you
want to run them, you need ghostscript and tiff utils as well.  Then
omit --disable-test-compare-images from your configure statement.

If you are building with MSVC and want to debug a crash in MSVC's
debugger, first start an instance of Visual C++.  Then run qpdf.  When
the abort/retry/ignore dialog pops up, first attach the process from
within visual C++, and then click Retry in qpdf.