Alan W. Irwin wrote: > On 2009-07-23 20:06-0400 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? > > Thanks for resurrecting this good idea. > > Note, binary distributions of PLplot were problematic for CPack (an empty > tarball was produced) when I tried that capability several years ago. > There > was a workaround for the problem at that time, but I cannot remember the > details. That issue may be fixed now, but before you get too far into > planning this you should try some experiments with cpack to make sure it > works the way you expect (i.e., it packages up the install tree). There > are > a number of cpack articles in the cmake wiki which should be a big help to > you in learning how to use cpack to create a binary release. You can find > those articles by using the search box of the wiki to look for everything > related to "cpack". (That's how I found the list of CPack binary package > formats discussed below.)
Thanks for the pointers, I'll have a look. > Also note that my new CMake-based build system for the installed examples > _should_ work on Windows (unlike the traditional Makefile+pkg-config > approach) so it should be quite useful for Windows users of your planned > binary package. But as far as I know, it hasn't been tested yet by our > developers with access to a Windows box so it may need some additional work > for that platform. I'll give it a test. I assume you are referring to the what you discussed in your May e-mails "Status of the new CMake-based build system for the installed examples"? Maybe we should add those instructions to the wiki and/or update README.testing? >> 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? > > To start, I would just go with what CPack provides. See > http://www.cmake.org/Wiki/CMake:CPackPackageGenerators. Wix is not on that > list of binary package formats, but if you do a google for wix and cpack > you > will see there is quite a bit of interest so I assume eventually it will be > available as a cpack option (or you might want to create that option > yourself with the appropriate CMake scripts for cpack). Sounds good. -Hazen ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
