[Gdal-dev] Proposal for Unified Windows Binaries

[Simon Perkins]

Ari Jolma wrote:
> Simon Perkins kirjoitti:
>> BTW, I'd like to put in my vote for using Visual Studio 2005 Express 
>> for pre-compiled windows binaries. It's free, up to date (at least 
>> until Visual Studio Orcas comes out later this year), actually 
>> available (unlike VS 2003), includes a proper optimizing compiler, 
>> and is generally a nicer bit of software than VS 2003. The manifest 
>> thing should be taken care of by the GDAL makefiles.
>
> This (from Wikipedia) worries me:
>
> "Unfortunately, the Express Edition does not include the Visual C++ 
> Redistributables and the SP1 version of the redistributables cannot be 
> downloaded from Microsoft. This causes deployment problems when using 
> Visual C++ 2005 Express Service Pack 1. For example, a "hello world" 
> console program (compiled with default settings) will not run on a PC 
> that does not already have Visual C++ 2005 Express SP1."

Interesting... I wasn't aware of this issue, but it does appear to be a 
big screw-up at Microsoft's end. They claim that they are working on an 
updated version of the redistributable package for SP1, but right now 
it's not available. If you have any non-express version of Visual Studio 
then it's included in that package. There are some workarounds, but 
they're messy, e.g.:

http://blogs.msdn.com/nikolad/archive/2007/04/02/workaround-for-using-vs2005-sp1-version-of-vcredist-exe-within-a-boostrapper-setup-exe.aspx



> I'd put my vote on MinGW (i.e., gcc) for the official Windows binary 
> distribution.

Eek. If we're producing pre-compiled binaries to make life easier for 
developers, then it seems to me that we should be addressing the needs 
of the mainstream of windows developers. AFAIK that is unquestionably 
Visual Studio (in some version or another). I've used MinGW and while 
it's possible to get it to work, it always feels rather "fringey" - 
anybody capable of getting MinGW to work is probably capable of building 
their own GDAL binaries... :)

Cheers,

Sy