MinGW-w64's ar.exe can't find libraries when trying to build a static library - static-linking

Question

I've now been trying to get MinGW-w64 to work on my system for several days, mainly because it has a more recent GCC version, but I either set things up wrong or there's some strange problem with MinGW-w64 itself.
I've now downloaded i686-w64-mingw32-gcc-4.7.2-release-win32_rubenvb, unpacked it to C:/Dev/mingw-ruben and added the path C:/Dev/mingw-ruben/bin to the $PATH environment variable.
What I'm trying to build is SFML 2 which comes with a CMake file. Running CMake will work just fine, the compiler gets recognized and passes all test. CMake also finds the ar.exe in the C:/Dev/mingw-ruben/binfolder. After generating the MinGW Makefile I switch to the windows command line and run mingw32-make install.
There's where the problem happens, I get the error:
mingw-ruben\bin\ar.exe: mingw-ruben/lib/libopengl32.a: No such file or directory
Or for the network library
mingw-ruben\bin\ar.exe: mingw-ruben/lib/libws2_32.a: No such file or directory
The error seems quite obvious and on check there really is no libopengl32.a or libws2_32.a in mingw-ruben/lib/, but the files is actually located in C:/Dev/mingw-ruben/i686-w64-mingw32/lib.
Now How can I tell ar/make/cmake to not only search in the mingw-ruben/lib directory but also in the mingw-ruben/i686-w64-mingw32/lib?
Would it be a good idea to copy all the content from the i686-w64-mingw32 subfolder to the mingw-ruben root folder?
As a side note: I can call mingw32-make install again and the procedure will continue but up on trying to link my application against SFML, I run into many unresolved symbol errors for the glXYZ functions from within SFML.
Further information: I'm on Windows 8 x64, but I think that doesn't really matter and yes I've tried MSYS but it doesn't resolve any of my issues.
Am I doing something wrong? Do I have to configure things specially?

Answer 1

January 2015 Edit
Now that SFML 2.2 has been released, this is no longer an issue and you have to link SFML's dependencies yourself when linking static.
January 2014 Edit
As of commit 165f2b1888 and f784fe4c07, which is included in the stable version SFML 2.1, MinGW-w64 compilers are supported.
However while discussing further with different parties it came to light, that the sfml_static_add_libraries marco a rather ugly hack was. In short it unpacked the static dependencies and included their obj files into the SFML library itself. This was most noticeable an issue, when trying to use your own version of GLEW, which failed since SFML was using its internal one already. The issue was brought to the forum and was pushed around for quite a bit, until Laurent finally gave in and went with the proper way of linking dependencies, which means you have to link them now on your own.
As of commit dbf01a775b, which is not included in the stable version of SFML 2.1, one has to link the SFML dependencies in the finally application, when linking statically against SFML.
Original
After some chat on the IRC we've figured it out.
It has nothing to do with MinGW but it's all SFML's fault. To reduce the dependencies list for SFML while linking statically the developer decided to manually extract the symbols from each library (opengl32, ws2_32, ...) which obviously isn't how one does things and violates some ODR rules. The actual error then occurs because the developer assumed that the library will be in the folder mingw/libbut with MinGW w64 it's located in a seperate directory mingw/version/lib and so ar.exe didn't find the library.
Solution
Removing the call to the sfml_static_add_libraries macro and then recompile. Afterwards you'll have to link all the dependencies for static linkages, like it should be.

Answer 2

I think it may be well a problem of the gcc distribution you downloaded.
A bit of light into the problem gives ruben's question here:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/45277/executing-binary-file-file-not-found
that seems to me related to that (although it is about linux and not win)
I was having a similar problem (the name of the missing file was different) few months ago with gcc 4.7.0 linux->win crosscompiler. So until now I lived with the standard ubuntu mingw-w64 package and only yesterday I gave another try to i686-w64-mingw32-gcc-4.7.2-release-linux64_rubenvb.tar.xz and it works without issues in otherwise same environment where the previous version was failing with "..ar.exe: ... no such file". Sometimes I develop also in windows, then I use http://www.mingw.org/ that was for me much easier to setup in Win. It supports only 32bit target but for my project it is sufficient.