I am most likely one of the less sharp knives in the drawer. As I wrote in another post I can compile ffmpeg using a set of nice instructions someone else has put together. One problem I could not figure out was however that the versions I made were always "SVN-rUnknown". I mentioned that the subversion I was using was the one in Cygwin and it finally dawned on me that the ffmpeg build process needs Subversion to figure out the correct version - and obviously since the MSYS environment had no knowledge of svn it'd be pretty darned difficult to use it. At first
I thought I'd have to build it myself, but luckily I stopped to think. And so I finally understood that the apps in the MSYS environment do not run sort of like in a virtual machine but natively (duhh! kind of like why mingw exists, innit?!?) and that the MSYS shell is just a shell and I should be able to run command line applications from anywhere in the file system. So I just dropped the command line version of Subversion for win32 in a directory and added the path to the bin directory to my PATH environment variable so I could run svn from anywhere - and there was no problem using it in the MSYS shell. Thus I recompiled ffmpeg and hey, presto, now the binary included from which svn version it was built instead of being "Unknown"!
"The wheel is spinning but the hamster is dead"
"Somewhere, a village is missing its idiot"
"The lights are on, but there's no one at home"
These are just some of the things I feel like telling myself. Anyway. Now you know.
Oh yeah, perhaps the biggest "duh" of all is that the instructions linked in the earlier post actually included instructions for installing subversion as well so someone just mindlessly following all the steps would have gotten it right right away... Gaaah! I've got to stop (trying) to think apparently! OTOH, now I finally understood several things that will help me using mingw/MSYS and I hope you do too!
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