Most of your comments come down to the fact that configure was clueless
to know where libxml, was freetype, gtk (for that matter), even a
problem with glib detection. The reason for this is that when installing
developer headers and libraries, most often the files that pkg-config
use have hard coded paths to directories that don't exist. SO one of the
first things you have to do is go through all the files in
/mingw/lib/pkgconfig/ directory and make sure that all hard coded paths
(usually justt he prefix environment variable are pointing to the right
place. I think in the case of glib the prefix and one of the include
directories had to be fixed up. Then of course gtk-config (and I believe
libxml2-config) were not present so they would not be detected. So in
the /mingw/bin directory I had to create those scripts (I sorta used the
linux ones as templates and hacked them where appropriate).
There were complaints about the automake version, but once the
appropriate pkg-config files were there, and the *-config scripts placed
in bin, ./configure was successfully able to find everything it needed
(including gtk, xml, libintl, freetype etc).
The tarball I want to generate are replacement files for the ones in the
/mingw/lib/pkgconfig and the /mingw/bin and the extra scripts that were
missing. You might ask why these files would be missing, or why they