Hi all ------------------------------------------------------------ To: Alpar Juttner <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [Help-glpk] Help-glpk] [Fwd: CMAKE build environment (and Message-ID: <1292446005.3927.22.ca...@none> From: Andrew Makhorin <[email protected]> Date: Wed, 15 Dec 2010 23:46:45 +0300 ------------------------------------------------------------
The build system is of secondary importance, unless it is really getting in the way. The main thing, of course, is the GLPK codebase. [snip] > - Cross compilation. > > Not sure what Alpar refers to here, autoconf/automake > are ideally suited for that. I occasionally cross-compile my project using GCC/Linux to produce statically-linked Windows binaries. In contrast, Xypron, I believe, builds native Windows executables using Microsoft Visual Studio. > - Windows support. > > Both autoconf and automake work on Windows, and you > can cross compile for mingw or cygwin. Supporting > Windows shouldn't be a priority, but if someone > supplies patches that don't cause havoc then there is > never harm in applying them. By way of disclosure! I use Linux and UNIX exclusively. Indeed, I happily abandoned my last aging Windows machine about six years ago. That said, I believe it is important for GLPK to support Windows, if at all possible. The reason I say this is that my partner teaches conventional and experimental power plant simulation (Aspen, Gatecycle, Ebsilon, if that means anything) at the Technical University of Berlin. Now you might imagine that at least some of the engineering students would run Linux. But no. Their laptops come preloaded with Windows and Microsoft products are nominally free for academic use. So that is what they use. The only break from this orthodoxy is the occasional Mac. And the only chink in this proprietary landscape is LibreOffice (was OpenOffice) because this is exactly free. Normative arguments about the merits of open source appear to be completely absent. That said, it seems that the current system works for GLPK? Andrew and others concentrate on the core code. And some separate but related initiatives build executables and write BAT files for Windows and so forth. In many respects, I though the comment from Alpar about adopting 'mercurial' or 'git' was the more significant. But judging by blogs from other software projects, the decision to change source code management practices is normally lengthy and involved. For GLPK, the current system works. But it does seem not to encourage or provoke many contributions to the core code. Perhaps that could be considered a benefit, but I rather think not. cheers Robbie --- Robbie Morrison PhD student -- policy-oriented energy system simulation Technical University of Berlin (TU-Berlin), Germany University email (redirected) : [email protected] Webmail (preferred) : [email protected] [from Webmail client] _______________________________________________ Help-glpk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-glpk
