Hi Hazen, On 24.07.2009, at 02:06, Hazen Babcock wrote:
I'd like to start offering a Windows binary and/or an installer alongwith our source releases. I now have access to a Windows box which I can put pretty much anything on to, i.e. Qt, WxWidgets, Cairo(?), etc... soI'm volunteering myself to generate whatever binaries needs to be generated to make this happen. This has come up several times in thepast and then died off so I'm not really sure where things stand. So, tostart, what needs to be done to provide a minimalist version of PLplotwith the basic windows drivers (wingcc?) with working C examples? Do weneed to provide both MinGW and Visual Studio versions of the dlls?
I'm actually "working" on this and already have something which provides the basic PLplot package. Adding other stuff gets then more and more "problematic". On one side is the size a problem. Putting QT and wxWidgets library into the (same) package will likely lead to a really *huge* download. In addition getting all cairo dependencies into the package is not easy and makes a big download. Also the compiler problem is not easy. In principle it's possible for both compilers to use a plplot dll created by another compiler, except functions which return a file handle (do we have any?). I'm also not sure if e.g. Visual C++ 2005 is able to use dlls form Visual C++ 2008 and vice versa - this obviously difficult to test if you only have one computer. So I would just provide a package for MinGW (3.4.5) and Visual C++ 2008 - should be not so much a problem if we using a batch file (see below).
I think an official looking Windows installer might be a nice feature and I was looking at WiX (http://wix.sourceforge.net/) as one option.Any suggestions here? Or is what we are installing simple enough so thata .zip file is sufficient and we shouldn't bother with an installer?
In no case I would use an installer. It just makes the package bigger for no obvious advantage. I think the minimal requirement of a Windows developer must be, that he is able to unzip a file. Zip file it must be, since tar.gz packages are not common.
Anyway the way I went and I think that's the correct one, since I have done that for other libraries as well is to provide a batch file which can be configured to produce the configuration in question on it's own using only plplot source and the compiler. It downloads necessary libraries (via curl) and unzips them (via 7zip), even compiles them (cmake) and then copies all together in one package. The big advantage of that is, that you only need run the batch file and everything gets created at once. No need to install any other libraries before. Problem here is that you need to use Windows CLI commands, since bash scripts or so don't work well on Windows even with winbash - and it's always best to use native tools, especially if you don't do cross platform here. I also consider(ed) to use kixtart (http://www.kixtart.org/ ) which is quite common on Windows, easy to install (just one exe) - actually I used it already.
Attached you will find a batch file which creates a plplot package already including the qhull library. Not well tested so problems may occur. But in my opinion starting from here is the best solution. It's easy for someone else to make a package as well, he just needs a compiler, cmake, kixtart, curl and 7zip all of them are easy to install.
What do you think? Regards, Werner
-Hazen ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
-- Dr. Werner Smekal Institut fuer Allgemeine Physik Technische Universitaet Wien Wiedner Hauptstr 8-10 A-1040 Wien Austria email: sme...@iap.tuwien.ac.at web: http://www.iap.tuwien.ac.at/~smekal phone: +43-(0)1-58801-13463 (office), +43-(0)1-58801-13469 (laboratory) fax: +43-(0)1-58801-13499
buildPLplot.kix
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