Uwe Stöhr wrote:
Angus Leeming wrote:
You could do it yourself you know...
It is in their bugtracker now.
Good man!
However, you really, really should invest some time and effort in
getting things to compile yourself...
I know, I know. I have MSVC now and will try to do this myself.
I hate to be a party pooper, but I'm afraid that LyX 1.3.x won't compile
with MSVC. There are two reasons for this:
1. If there were some "make environment", by which I mean either an MSVC
solution file or a bunch of Makefiles that could be used to invoke the MSVC
compiler, then you'd find that the code compiled (probably) but failed to
link. That's because of some MSVC peculiarity that regards 'structs' and
'classes' as different beasts (true in C#, not in C++). The code in LyX is
'inconsistent' in this regard; sometimes we use 'struct Foo' and elsewhere
'class Foo' for the same 'Foo'. MSVC gets confused.
The point I'm trying to make is that the LyX 1.3 code would need some
(relatively minor) tweaking to get it to work with MSVC.
However, the far bigger problem is:
2. There's no build environment for the MSVC compiler. In LyX 1.4 we have
Asger's masterful lyx.sln solution file with which to build LyX with MSVC.
In LyX 1.3 we have only the GNU autotools-generated Makefiles.
Unfortunately, it's currently impossible to get these autotools-generated
Makefiles to invoke the MSVC compiler in a syntax that this compiler
understands.
There is a work around. It is possible to get the Makefiles to call
'wrapmsvc' to compile each C++ file. 'wrapmsvc' is a little executable that
takes a bunch of arguments understood by the g++ compiler and translates
these arguments into something understood by MSVC. All very clever; it
means that it should be possible to build LyX within an MSYS environment
(so that the GNU autotools will work) but using MSVC as the compiler
(through wrapmsvc).
I say 'should' be possible. However, I never succeeded in doing so myself.
First, you'd need to install Cygwin, because wrapmsvc uses the Cygwin path
mapping functions to translate unix/style/paths to C:\Windows\ones. I got
that much working. However, I failed to get wrapmsvc to run properly, so
gave up. It may be that you would succeed where I failed. Certainly, Ruurd
used to use this wrapmsvc tool to build his port.
If all this sounds daunting, it is :(
In summary, the only way to compile LyX 1.3 on Windows ATM is to use the
MinGW/MSYS environment. Ie, to use g++ with its extraordinarily long link
times. Having said that, once you've set up this environment, building LyX
is as trivial as typing "sh build_lyxwin.sh 'lyx-1.3.7pre4'" in the
development/Win32/packaging directory.
Sorry to have to be the bringer of bad news.
Angus
