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


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