Hi Steve: On 2013-06-26 13:48-0000 Schwartz, Steven J wrote:
> My impression is that the most difficult binaries are in the *nix world. It seems easier to create windows and mac binaries that will run without being too fussy about the version of everything else that is installed, but I have less experience in compiling against distributed 3rd party binary libraries which is what any plplot user would need to do. For Linux there has been a huge effort concerning soname conventions and backwards-compatible API over the last 10 years. So, for example, the occurrences of API breakage that has affected the PLplot build on Linux have been quite minimal. I assume the Windows libraries implemented by Microsoft are just as good as the Linux libraries in this respect. But a major problem for the Windows platform is it does not include the free libraries. For those, there is currently a "wild west" atmosphere so my understanding is Windows users of free software often end up with multiple incompatible versions of free libraries installed and a resulting "dll hell". The obvious answer to this issue is distributions of free software for the Windows platform with a guaranteed coherent ABI/API. The Cygwin distribution is the only one of such distributions that are available currently. In the future, the build_projects project, the jhbuild project (currently used to build GTK libraries), and/or the emerge project (currently used to build Qt4 and KDE) may be the core of additional Windows distributions of free software to provide Cygwin with some much-needed competition. Although I am obviously aware of the huge binary distribution potential for build_projects, I intend for now to mostly ignore that potential and concentrate almost exclusively on expanding build_projects from the current proof-of-concept stage to a fairly powerful build script that satisfies all my personal PLplot, ephcom, te_gen, and FreeEOS build and test needs on the Wine version of Windows. I emphasize that although build_projects is configured with CMake, the actual builds of the "external" projects that occur with this approach are all configured by CMake's ExternalProject_Add command. That command allows the use of any build system (e.g., CMake-based, autotools-based, or even Make-based) for the external project being built. For example, build_projects right now builds CMake-based shapelib and autotools-based wxwidgets on all platforms. Thus, others such as the QSAS team are certainly welcome to test this build script on any platform and add their own build configurations (which should be pretty trivial if you follow, say, the shapelib template) for software that interests them. 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); the Time Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.sf.net); 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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by Windows: Build for Windows Store. http://p.sf.net/sfu/windows-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
