For kicks and giggles, and so everyone can see that flexibility of GCC's installation isn't a pie-in-the-sky dream, I installed MinGW's packages and mine in "C:\MinGW GCC in a path\with spaces", made sure that the only MinGW-related environment variable was "C:\MinGW GCC in a path\with spaces\bin" tacked onto the end of PATH, made sure that no directories named "mingw" or "MinGW" existed
anywhere (or any of the directory names used when compiling on Ubuntu), and
built wxWidgets 2.8.4 and Code::Blocks, both on drive G:\, completely without a hitch. That's what I call freedom, folks.
BTW, what bugs have you encountered with latest WinAPI and binutils?
The latest binutils' "windres" has a bug that shows up while building wxWidgets; it was mentioned on a MinGW mailing list and Danny Smith (I believe) had a fix for it that should appear in the next MinGW binutils release.
As far as the latest w32api package goes, I don't remember for sure when and how I encountered the bug, though I think it, also, occured while using or building wxWidgets. Since you asked, I'll see if I can track it down again.
Later edit:
I didn't encounter any bugs building with the latest version, so it may have been a bug in 3.8 that got ironed out in 3.9. I'll have to update my docs. Thanks for reminding me.
Cheers,
John E. / TDM