Werner Smekal wrote: > 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 along >> with 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... so >> I'm volunteering myself to generate whatever binaries needs to be >> generated to make this happen. This has come up several times in the >> past and then died off so I'm not really sure where things stand. So, to >> start, what needs to be done to provide a minimalist version of PLplot >> with the basic windows drivers (wingcc?) with working C examples? Do we >> need 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 was thinking of just providing the relevant PLplot dlls for working with Qt, etc, rather than actually including Qt, etc, in our distribution. I don't think this is totally orthogonal to typical Windows style as programs like PyQt do not come with Python. The user would be responsible for downloading mingw, Qt, etc, depending on their own needs. However, perhaps then we'd start having problems with incompatible dlls? >> 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 that >> a .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. My preference would be some sort of pre-compiled binary, basically a zip of c:\program files\plplot, which I think is what Alan was discussing with cpack. Someone who already knows that they want to use PLplot is probably willing to install all of the pre-dependencies, but someone who is simply trying to evaluate it might not be so excited. However these two approaches are not mutually exclusive. How about we put your script in the repo in say sys/win32? Then we can work on the testing, etc. Once we're happy with the stability and performance we can add directions about how to use it to the wiki. Down the road we could then use it to generate our pre-compiled binaries if we decide to go that route. -Hazen ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
