I've just been trying to get MinGW working without requiring the compiler's bin directory to be in the PATH. It mostly works now, but unfortunately I ran into problems with simple_run_action. The problem essentially is that this rule ignores RUN_PATH, which may be set by some toolsets (a quick grep shows borland, cw, gcc, and intel) to indicate additional paths that must be added to PATH when running the executable. In addition, I'm wondering how this is supposed to work with a cross-compiler. We really shouldn't be requiring cross-compilers to have access to the target system for ordinary builds.
All good points: ideally this feature would simply use the regular "run" rule, but this breaks the regression testing for some reason :( BTW RUN_PATH seems to be under-maintained, because I've never managed to get Intel tests to run without manually setting up the Intel environment first. The cross compiler issue is a good one - normally this rule is used only for testing rather than building the libraries - however it would be nice to have a better solution. John.