Alan, Arjen, et al.,

I have been following this thread, and the parallel ones re Cygwin build and 
also build_project, with some interest. We ship a binary Windows version of our 
QSAS software (which includes the Qt libraries and a somewhat stripped-down 
version of plplot which only drives our own version of the qt-widgets device). 
This seems to work fine. As I have succumbed to the corporate Windows pressure 
I no longer use linux so have spent more time exploring aspects of Windows 
builds. I'm a novice in Cygwin, mingw, and msys.

QSAS builds under msys. We/I don't build Qt from source (but if Alan has a 
foolproof way to do that I'd consider having a go). So I use the last Qt4 
binary system provided by Qt, namely 4.8.4. This was built against mingw 4.4, 
and there are various discussion-group posts suggesting that compiling against 
this binary Qt requires using the same version of mingw. Luckily (?) someone 
out there made a zipped file with mingw 4.4.0 available for precisely that 
reason. This I access via the msys layer (which is needed for some or other 
reason, rather than just building directly in mingw. I have noticed that other 
modules we use didn't interface correctly when built directly from mingw for 
probably subtle reasons, so I have stuck to always working in an msys 
window/environment). We don't use cmake (and have ceased using configure - 
preferring a relatively simple and transparent build shell-script. The script 
builds the necessary bits of plplot alongside other 3rd party modules and the 
rest of
  QSAS).

I have tried to build a more complete plplot against this configuration, namely:

Windows 7
Qt 4.8.4 binary
Mingw 4.4.0
Msys (current version)
Cmake 2.8.11 (windows)

The build almost completes normally, but test-drv-info crashes dealing with the 
qt drivers. The windows crash report shows that the error occurred in 
libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll. Nonetheless everything appears to have been built and 
installs ok. The native plplot drivers (wingcc, ps,psc, svg) run fine. The Qt 
ones enjoy mixed success. Sometimes they crash in the same way, other times 
they run fine (small changes to the source files - looks like some memory 
issues). The qt ps and pdf files always generate a portrait page with the plot 
spilling off the right hand edge of the page or, if some appropriate 
combination of orientation options is given on the command line, shrunk and 
rotated and pushed to the top-right of the portrait page. I've not tried to 
install the extra bits to try to build other drivers such as wxWidgets, cairo, 
etc., and do not need them. To be honest, the bare wingcc and psc drivers are 
adequate for my testing needs, with my main work done via QSAS. [There is a 
separate noti
 on here about what a "minimal binary plplot" distribution might contain, which 
risks everyone chipping in their one additional driver and binding until you 
get back to the full distribution :-)]

I offer the above (a) in case it is helpful to anyone (b) to offer continued 
encouragement and (c) in case any of the above wrinkles ring a bell in 
someone's head and they have suggestions on how I might improve any aspect 
thereof.

Best wishes
Steve

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Professor Steven J Schwartz        Phone:  +44 (0)207 594 7660
Head, Space & Atmospheric Physics  Fax:    +44 (0)207 594 7772
The Blackett Laboratory            Email:  s.schwa...@imperial.ac.uk
Imperial College London            Office: Huxley 6M67A
London SW7 2AZ, UK                 Web:    www.sp.ph.ic.ac.uk/~sjs
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