PDCurses missing seperator error in Cygwin

Question

I've been trying to get PDCurses in Visual Studio 2015 for 2 days now and I'm still having trouble. The best solution I found was downloading Cygwin and using the make file. When I call makefile I resieve a seperator.

$ make -f vcwin32.mak WIDE=Y
vcwin32.mak:10: *** missing separator.  Stop.

When I view file, these are the first 15 lines.

# Visual C++ NMakefile for PDCurses library - Win32 VC++ 2.0+
#
# Usage: nmake -f [path\]vcwin32.mak [DEBUG=] [DLL=] [WIDE=] [UTF8=] [target]
#
# where target can be any of:
# [all|demos|pdcurses.lib|testcurs.exe...]

O = obj

!ifndef PDCURSES_SRCDIR
PDCURSES_SRCDIR = ..
!endif

!include $(PDCURSES_SRCDIR)\version.mif
!include $(PDCURSES_SRCDIR)\libobjs.mif

Line 10:

!ifndef PDCURSES_SRCDIR

I'm learning how much I really suck at command. Any advice?

Answer 1

The makefile is (given the name vcwin32.mak) for Visual C++, win32 (which uses a different make program, i.e., nmake). It won't work with GNU make.

PDCurses's win32 dependencies don't include anything relevant to Cygwin. Most people would use Visual Studio, which provides nmake.

Occasionally someone builds win32-applications with Cygwin, but you'd have better success with mingw (fewer extraneous libraries).