I have asked Arjen, one of the PLplot developers with access to MinGW-w64/MSYS2 to find out for himself whether installing and using this platform with a space in the install prefix is possible or not by the "try and see" method. However, we would be interested if anyone else here has tried this, and if so are there any "gotchas" that Arjen has to be aware of other than some of the MinGW-w64/MSYS2 free software libraries that are not essential to the basic Unix tool and build functionality of this platform will not work under this scenario?
Spaces in full pathnames are something of a hot-button issue with some free software projects because it does take a lot of care to make sure a free software project such as PLplot is free of such "space in full pathname" issues, and some such projects (such as PLplot until now) have not taken that care. As a recent result of an on-going project to clean up our act in this regard, I have had almost complete (except for 3 components I am still working on) success with comprehensive tests of PLplot on Linux with all of source, build, and install tree having a space in their prefix. So that is a very encouraging result. However, free software libraries available on Linux typically do not have spaces in their full pathnames. Therefore these comprehensive tests necessarily exclude that possibility so we hope to use both MinGW-w64/MSYS2 and Cygwin for this purpose to complement my Linux tests. If Arjen finds a special MinGW-w64/MSYS2 install with space in the installation prefix works well enough for him to build a minimalist PLplot (i.e., a version with all optional components dropped so that it relies very little on external free software libraries) then that result fully answers the question in the subject line. And assuming that test was a success, then the next step would be for him to go for a full PLplot build noting the components that do not work and investigating with my help (by simply looking at "make VERBOSE=1" results to spot and fix any "space in full pathname" issues our build system has imposed by not quoting or escaping the spaces properly. Once we have done all such fixes, then we also expect some of our optional components will not work because of inherent "space in full pathname" issue for those components dependencies. For example, if the Qt5 suite of libraries had some inherent issue with being installed with a space in their installation prefix, then we would have to drop our optional "qt" device driver component (which depends on Qt5) for our further tests. We also hope to use Cygwin for this special test purpose to complement the tests on Linux and MinGW-w64/MSYS2. Therefore, if anyone here has relevant experience on that platform as well, we would be interested in your comments. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Msys2-users mailing list Msys2-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/msys2-users
