ok, cool.
When I last compiled it I put them all in the place it installs by
default with the --prefix=/mingw/ taking care of putting them in a
good place.
We might need to change a few things with SDL + SDL_friends - like the
strdup you talk of. Also maybe changing the default back to the
directx renderer rather than the gdi one.
In that case we can make a set of patches that people can download.
So there will be everything available for people to redo everything
from scratch if they want to.
For an easier method I guess something like what Marcus suggested
which downloads all of the dependencies, plus the patches. Then goes
through applying the patches to each part (including mingw if we have
to). We could build this into the setup file as a new command.