On 2010-02-10 20:39+0100 Werner Smekal wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Hi, > >> >> Werner, your combined knowledge of windows and CMake makes you the obvious >> candidate to ask Windows-related questions in an informed way on the CMake >> list. Therefore, would you please ask on that list whether there is a way >> for cmake to set up Windows builds to allow dll's to be found or is it a >> necessity to externally set the PATH? > > If a executable is run and a dll is needed, Windows looks first in the > current directory for the dll. Then in the PATH. Then in > c:\windows\system32 (and in some other system directories. Maybe PATH > comes later, but this doesn't matter). Since we don't want to copy the > dlls multiple times, our only chance is to change the PATH environment > variable. I just read the cmake documentation about setting environment > variables > (http://www.cmake.org/cmake/help/cmake-2-8-docs.html#command:set) and it > should be possible to change the PATH variable that way. Presumably only > as long as the Terminal window is open (so at least for the cmake > configure stage). If you close the terminal, start it again this change > is surely gone and I assume, if you then compile plplot (which is > already configured) PATH won't be changed again, so you run into > problems again. So this is no solution.
I think you must be right. This is the issue (environment variable set in cmake not available for build) that I referred to based on my Linux experience with environment variables. > > Actually there are two problems. > > 1) plplot build is not finished, since testing the rc files fails, due > to the "missing" dlls. I would suggest that for windows we force that > the test-drv-info executable will be built into the dll folder (where > for windows all dlls are gathered). Therefore the build gets through > (since the dlls are in the same folder than test-drv-info). Please go ahead with that. > > 2) The examples don't run, since the dlls are not found. Now you need to > either set the PATH variable or copy the dlls. User interaction is > needed, the dlls are in the dll directory and the examples are in the > examples directory, and this shouldn't be changed. So IMO the best we > can do is, that in summary.cmake we add at the end a message (with many > !!!!!) if it's a shared build on Windows and examples are built as well, > the user is asked to add the dll directory to the PATH variable. Please go ahead with that. Also, please implement a similar message for the new CMake-based build system for the installed examples. See the summary message at the end of examples/CMakeLists.txt. > > I believe the most Windows developers know about what to do, if they run > a program and a message box pops up telling him that the dll is missing. > > Still not perfect, but on the other hand it's not possible to cover > everything. If the user wants to compile his own executables, he *must* > take care of the dlls anyway. So if he doesn't RTFM it's best he gets > into trouble trying to run the examples already. It would be more > confusing if the examples run and his own programs not. Agreed. 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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ SOLARIS 10 is the OS for Data Centers - provides features such as DTrace, Predictive Self Healing and Award Winning ZFS. Get Solaris 10 NOW http://p.sf.net/sfu/solaris-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
