Trying to compile slapd on cygwin, what does this automake error mean?

Answer 1

The root cause seems to be

/usr/lib/gcc/i686-pc-cygwin/3.4.4/../../../../i686-pc-cygwin/bin/ld: cannot find -luser32

This is either a problem with your cygwin installation, or the configure scripts are to old to recognise and handle the installation.

Answer 2

If -luser32 is failing, try installing the w32api Cygwin package.

Answer 3

After much trial & error I found the correct answer for this problem: The reason for this error is that the Cygwin environment was not set up correctly.

The login-user on a domain, and so the /etc/passwd & /etc/group files were not set up correctly by default. The solution was to make a local user-account and then re-build the passwd and groups files.

After that, GCC could build just fine.

Sounds crazy, I know.