--- /dev/null
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+-- Copyright (c) 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc. --
+-- --
+-- Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a --
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+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+-- $Id: README.MinGW,v 1.1 2008/12/14 19:22:16 juergen Exp $
+-- Author: Juergen Pfeifer
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+This is work in progress, but it's in an state where one can see it
+works at least on the Windows Console.
+
+To build ncurses for native Windows, you need the MinGW toolchain from
+http://www.mingw.org
+
+You should install also the MSYS package, so that you've a shell environment
+that allows you to run the scripts, especially configure etc.
+
+Using MinGW is a pragmatic decision, it's the easiest way to port this
+heavily UNIX based sourcebase to native Windows. The goal is of course
+to provide the includes, libraries and DLLs to be used with the more
+common traditional development environments on Windows, mainly with
+Microsoft Visual Studio.
+
+If you start a bash from the MSYS environment, please make sure that the
+Microsoft Development tools are in your PATH right after the MinGW
+tools. The LIB.EXE tool is the only one needed. You need this only if
+you want to build DLLs that work with native Windows programs. If you
+don't have any Microsoft Development tools on your machine, consider
+at least to get the free "Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition".
+It contains the LIB.EXE tool. You may also use this compiler to test
+writing native Windows programs using the ncurses DLLs without using
+MinGW then for writing apps.
+
+Please unset the TERM environment variable, so that the Console driver
+gets activated.
+
+This code requires WindowsNT 5.1 or better, which means on the client
+Windows XP or better, on the server Windows Server 2003 or better.
+
+In order to build the DLLs, you must call
+
+ make dlls
+
+A lot is still TODO, e.g.:
+
+ - Mouse support for the Console
+ - Wide Character support
+ The Win32Con driver should actually only use Unicode in the
+ future.
+ - Thread support (locking)
+ - A GUI console driver
+ - Support for Terminals attached via a serial port (via terminfo)
+ - Support for networked Terminal connections (via terminfo)
+
+To support terminfo, we need to have an ioctl() simulation for the
+serial and networked Terminals.