This MSYS2/Cygwin tool creates a build environment for Pidgin on Windows, automating the manual steps described in the official documentation.
Copyright (c) 2012-2016 Renato Silva. Copyright (C) 2024-2025 Pidgin Developers Licensed under the terms of the 3-clause BSD license.
To use this script you need to have a posix like shell. Some examples are MSYS2 and Cygwin.
Creating a build environment is as simple as running the command with a destination directory:
./pidgin-windev.sh <directory name>Note: This will take a considerable amount of time to run.
This will download the sources of everything into
<directory name>/downloads. It will extract evertying into
<directory name>/win32-dev and extract the current Pidgin release into
<directory name>/pidgin-<version>.
When it has completed you can then "activate" the build directory by running
eval $(./pidgin-windev.sh <directory name> --path)This will update the PATH environment variable for you.
You can now move to the Pidgin directory and build with
make -f Makefile.mingw.