Problem compiling NONMEM with mingw gfortran 4.3.0 builds

[Steve Chapel]

FX Coudert wrote:
>> We could use official or semi-official builds of stable releases for 
>> production, especially if those releases were well-known and used by 
>> many users. I actually tried DJGPP builds of gfortran first, but ran 
>> into the 127 character command line limit. One of my problems with 
>> MinGW builds is that there are so few pre-built binaries for Windows, 
>> and they don't seem to be very well known. I think the MinGW could 
>> benefit users by providing pre-built binaries as DJGPP does, and 
>> those users could in turn help MinGW by providing more extensive 
>> testing of the releases.
>
> I don't quite understand what you mean here. MinGW (the project) has 
> many binaries available for download, and they actually are quite 
> conservative with respect to the software they package, I think. So, 
> they do have well-known, stable binaries in my opinion. In fact, 
> they're actually to stable for you to use, right now!

It's taken a while, but I think I've figured out what's going on. MinGW 
isn't releasing builds of GCC 4.x yet because of the number of 
regressions, as discussed at 
<http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.mingw.user/21938>. That's why 
there are no stable builds of gfortran yet.

MinGW offers downloads of older versions of GCC, including g77, at their 
downloads site: <http://www.mingw.org/download.shtml>. To tell you the 
truth, that download site was very hard to find,  and when I was first 
there I  found only the GCC 3.4.5 candidate builds. After some more 
searching, I found that the MinGW installer makes it easy to install GCC 
compilers. I just tried using MinGW-5.1.3 to download g77, and it seems 
to work. I'll try to let people know about this way of getting g77 so 
they don't need to keep using g77 version 2.95.

It would have been great if someone could have just told me all this at 
first. Oh well, at least I know now. Is there anything else I should know?

Thanks,
Steve