Self-contained executable for Windows built on msys2

[efauk]

Is it possible to produce a self-contained executable for Windows, when building on msys2? If so, what are the necessary link flags?
Thank you in advance.

[Andarwinux]

If you want a static exe, then you can't rely on prebuilt packages for msys2, you have to build everything from scratch yourself.

[kasper93]

Why? MSYS2 provides also static libs, it should be possible to produce fully static library.

[Andarwinux]

Oops, indeed. The last time I looked at msys2 there were still problems with ffmpeg's pkgconf and some dependencies, but that's been fixed for a while now.

[Andarwinux]

Doesn't seem a big problem, except that there is still hardcoded -lstdc++ and -lrt.

[kasper93]

I never tried this with MSYS2, you can try -Ddefault_library=static -Dprefer_static=true in meson flags and check what happens.

[Andarwinux]

I'm getting lots, one of them for instance is:

(...)/bin/ld.exe: (...)/msys64/ucrt64/lib/librav1e.a(rav1e.std-e80dc1a33fabde32.std.10161f498c56c4aa-cgu.06.rcgu.o.rcgu.o):(.text+0x3030): multiple definition of __rdl_alloc'; (...)/msys64/ucrt64/lib/librsvg-2.a(std-52a03da70d492f12.std.c7e05963787d85c4-cgu.04.rcgu.o):(.text+0x5bb0): first defined here

You can try add -Wl,--allow-multiple-definition to LDFLAGS, which will force linker to ignore multiple definitions, but it's risky and you shouldn't use it in a production environment. Once rav1e add rust 1.79 support, this problem will go away on its own, so you can wait for a while.

[efauk]

I haven't managed to link correctly. I think some static libraries are missing, since I'm getting lots of undefined symbols now :(

I'm just copying a few, but I'm getting hundreds:

(...)/ld.exe: C:/msys64/ucrt64/lib/libSDL2.a(SDL_hidapi.c.obj):(.text+0x158f):
undefined reference to `__imp_SetupDiGetDeviceRegistryPropertyA'
(...)/ld.exe: C:/msys64/ucrt64/lib/libSDL2.a(SDL_windows_gaming_input.c.obj):(.
text+0xb54): undefined reference to `__imp_CM_Locate_DevNodeA'
(...)/ld.exe: C:/msys64/ucrt64/lib/libSDL2.a(SDL_windows_gaming_input.c.obj):(.
text+0xba4): undefined reference to `__imp_CM_Get_Parent'
(...)/ld.exe: C:/msys64/ucrt64/lib/libSDL2.a(SDL_windows_gaming_input.c.obj):(.
text+0xbc2): undefined reference to `__imp_CM_Get_Device_IDA'

[Andarwinux]

try add -lole32 -luuid -lsetupapi to LDFLAGS.

[efauk]

Yeah! That seems to work. Great, thanks a lot.
Although I still getting hundreds of errors. I guess I need to fix them by manually adding the dependencies to LDFLAGS one by one?

[Andarwinux]

Yes. But you can also figure out the problematic pkgconf to manually fix Requires.private or Libs.private, which is easy enough for sysroot closed build, but I'm not sure it's appropriate in a distro environment.
You might consider reporting such problems to msys2, but that might take some time.