One MinGW, many GCC versions - how to do it?

Question

Is it possible to have different GCC installations working with one MinGW installation?

By MinGW I mean the common base which is always needed regardless which version of GCC compiler we're going to install and use;

• MinGW runtime
• binutils
• make
• MinGW API for MS-Windows

and many other components which are part of MinGW but are not even required by GCC.

Answer 1

MinGW is a GCC installation. Are you asking "can I have multiple versions of MinGW installed?" - Yes you can. Simply download and install the different MinGW vertsions in different directories. MinGW comes with a .BAT file that when run sets up the local environment for that particular version.

If this isn't the answer you are after, please expand your question.

To anwer which:

• There is no MinGW runtime - it uses the Windows libraries.
• if you don't want make, delete it or use an alternative
• binutils - there may be dependencies between these and the compiler, I'd recommend keeping separate versions for each MinGW installation.
• The Windowsheaders? I guess you could centralise them.

But why would you want to do this? It's much easier and convenient to have completely separate installations. And the space they take up is nothing on even a half-modern PC.

Answer 2

Do you mean you want to have multiple versions of GCC available to your MinGW environment? I don't believe that would be a problem, GCC is just a set binaries that come with a MinGW install.

You should be able to download older/newer versions of the binaries and put them in the $BIN path and they should work properly. You'd obviously have to make sure to have different names for the different versions.

Otherwise, I'm not completely sure what you mean about multiple "GCC installations."