On 2008-01-30 08:20+0100 Werner Smekal wrote:

> Hi,
>
> the only thing I want to finish before this release is, that
> wxPLplotdemo.cpp is built with the c++ demos during plplot compilation
> if BUILD_TEST=ON. Reason is, that the makefile which is generated and
> copied during the make install stage only works if pkg-config is
> available, which is not the case for Mac OS X and Windows, though it's
> possible to install it. But at least for Windows that's not practical.

Actually, pkg-config works on both Mac OS X and windows (see further
discussion below).

>
> I tried to modify the makefile so that it works also for windows, but
> actually we would need to write a CMakeLists.txt, since you could have
> different compiler, etc. In order to advertise plplot on the wxwidgets
> mailing list I want to provide a short demo which everybody can try out
> easily (which is the case if you manage to compile plplot with wxWidgets
> support :) ). Therefore I want to have wxPLplotdemo compiled during the
> BUILD_TEST=ON stage (only if wxWidgets was found).
>
> It should be fairly trivial to change the CMakeLists.txt in
> examples\c++, but are there any objections to that?

None, and please go ahead.

My view is ctest on Unix is a developer build-tree convenience to quickly
test changes without having to do an install, while the install tree tests
are for both developers and users to show (a) that their system is installed
properly and (b) how to compile applications with pkg-config that use any of
the PLplot libraries.  I hope we eventually move to this same philosophy for
our windows users as well rather than relying on the build tree with our
libraries and font/map data scattered all over in inconvenient locations.

Our Mac OS X developers have reported good results for the install-tree
tests so pkg-config must work right out of the box for them.  I think we have
also had good reports of install tree tests for Cygwin.  Anyhow, a special
Cygwin version of pkg-config is available from
http://cygwin.com/cgi-bin2/package-cat.cgi?file=pkg-config%2Fpkg-config-0.20-1&grep=pkg-config

For windows (with MinGW or Microsoft compilers), pkg-config is available
from http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/downloads.html and/or
http://www.gtk.org/download-windows.html.  The Unix man page for pkg-config
mentions windows options such as --msvc-syntax which apparently delivers -L
and -l flags in a form which the microsoft compilers can understand.  Also,
I assume you would need some alternative (perhaps nmake?) to the "make"
approach we currently use to build the installed examples on Unix and
Cygwin.  However, I think all the pieces are available on windows to build
the install-tree examples, but we just need to convince a windows developer
to put it all together so the install-tree concept is completely supported
on windows.

Werner, I hope the above information/encouragement convinces you to at least
try and get the install tree working for windows with pkg-config after you
are completely satisfied with ctest on windows.

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); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); 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
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