I've been trying to get OpenEXR to compile on MinGW for some time now so that we (the Aqsis team) can release a version of Aqsis that supports OpenEXR on both Windows and Posix. However, as others have found on this list, it doesn't seem that OpenEXR is well setup to compile on MinGW.
The main stumbling block I've hit so far is threading, I've tried to fool it into using the Win32 threading code, no joy, I've tried to install and get it to use the Win32 port of pthreads, again no joy. The wierdest of all is that --disable-threading doesn't actually seem to disable threading, it still tries and fails to build the IlmThread project of ilmbase. I've hit these problems with both the stable
1.4.0 source archive, and the newer split 1.5.0 of OpenEXR and 0.9.0 IlmBase source archive.
If anyone has any suggestions on how to get this all to compile on MinGW/MSYS, it would be most appreciated.