On 2015-01-21 23:09+0100 Arnaud Darmont wrote: > Alan, > > thank you for the detailed answer. Cmake is what i'm trying to use. > > As i understand this won't be easy and i fear that there will be deployment > difficulties on customer systems. My goal would be to distribute an > executable of the final software along with the source so that they can just > run it without any installation. Will in the end PLplot allow for this or is > it the wrong library?
I think your first priority should be to get the PLplot build to work on either Cygwin or MinGW-w64/MSYS2. Both of those platforms should provide a full suite of external libraries that PLplot depends upon to provide complete functionality. Those external libraries include libqhull and shapelib (both needed by the core PLplot library for full functionality), libharu (needed for the pdf device driver), the wxwidgets library (needed by the PLplot wxwidgets device driver), Qt5 (needed for the qt device driver), and the Pango/Cairo subset of GTK+ (needed for the cairo device driver). Note, that qt and cairo are currently our best device drivers, and one of our developers is working hard to bring our wxwidgets device driver up to that same level of quality. I would avoid MinGW/MSYS because it supplies few libraries and therefore your PLplot build there will generate an extremely lite version of PLplot that doesn't have the capabilities (e.g., none of the wxwidgets, qt, or cairo device drivers) provided by the equivalent PLplot build on those other two Windows platforms. If you like the PLplot capabilities you find on either Cygwin or MinGW-w64/MSYS2, then I believe the answer to the deployment issue you brought up above is to build your software package against a static version of PLplot (which should be trivial to arrange) which in turn has been built against static versions of the external libraries (non-trivial to arrange). If you can do that, it virtually solves your deployment issues since you don't have to worry about version incompatibilities of ABI incompatibility issues with shared external libraries your users may or may not have installed, i.e., no dll-hell issues. My understanding is that CMake does have a method to force linking with static external libraries if they are available rather than external shared libraries (its default preference). But I have never actually tried that myself, and you would likely have to ask on the CMake list or google for how to do it. In sum, my advice to solve the deployment issue is to abandon MinGW/MSYS (due to lack of external libraries) and try either/both MinGW-w64/MSYS2 or else Cygwin. If satisfied with one of those verify it has static versions of the necessary external libraries that you can install. Then figure out how to convince CMake to preferentially use static libraries for linking, and build a static version of PLplot against those external libraries. Then statically link your software with that static PLplot for your deployment. 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 __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ New Year. New Location. New Benefits. New Data Center in Ashburn, VA. GigeNET is offering a free month of service with a new server in Ashburn. Choose from 2 high performing configs, both with 100TB of bandwidth. Higher redundancy.Lower latency.Increased capacity.Completely compliant. http://p.sf.net/sfu/gigenet _______________________________________________ Plplot-general mailing list Plplot-general@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-general
