[Qgis-user] Why no proper QGis Windows installer yet?

[Michael Toews]

Hi,

I've been patiently waiting for a simple standalone installer for distribution at my workplace (we're still using 0.11) -- many thanks for the efforts!

On the topic of GRASS, I'm not sure exactly where the difficulties are, but I'm wondering if GRASS support is really needed for a standalone QGIS installer? From what I understand, QGIS doesn't actually require GRASS at all, except that certain plug-ins do require GRASS. Omitting GRASS from a standalone QGIS installer would cut down the complexity and size of both the installer and installation on host computer. If GRASS functionality is required by a Windows user, then a OSGeo4W should be recommended.

I could be in my own thought-bubble, but any there any other thoughts regarding GRASS integration?

-Mike

----- Original Message -----
From: "G. Allegri" <giohappy at gmail.com>
To: "Agustin Lobo" <alobolistas at gmail.com>
Cc: "Werner Macho" <werner.macho at gmail.com>, qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org
Sent: Wednesday, 25 March, 2009 10:38:29 GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
Subject: Re: [Qgis-user] Why no proper QGis Windows installer yet?

I've opened various posts too on the problem. Various things are
getting fixed for grass on Windows, as many bugs are coming out on
Vista more then XP, but I think a real solution would come from a deep
grass code refactoring to make it compile with MSVC* . Probably it
would solve many problems (qgis binding, python/wxwidgets, etc.).
I've already launched on a previous post, to grass-dev and
osgeo4w-dev, the proposal to organize a dedicated found raising for
it. If anyone is interested in supporting this initiative, I can share
some of my time (and money) for it...

Giovanni

* this fact has been discussed a lot in the past. I'm not such an
expert developer, but AFAIK, many bugs happen with grass compiled
against MSVC libraries (osgeo4w package) while they don't when built
agains MinGW. 1) MSVC builds better on Windows, 2) all the stuff in
osgeo4w is compiled with MSVC -> probably it would be the best to have
grass compiled with MSVC too!