[GRASS-dev] Updates to wingrass-extralibs

[Paul Kelly]

Spurred on by the work that Marco is doing, I've finally got around to 
packaging the new versions of essential libraries for WinGRASS that I 
compiled a couple of months ago. In case it is helpful to anybody, the 
13MB file wingrass-extralibs-20080303.tar.gz now at 
http://www.stjohnspoint.co.uk/grass/ contains the following versions of 
libraries:
xdr-4.0-mingw32
proj-4.6.0
gdal-1.5.0
fftw-2.1.5 (this was before I realised FFTW 3.x is OK with GRASS)
tcl-8.5.0
tk-8.5.0

I have copies of all the source packages but I don't have the 
bandwidth/diskspace really to make them available there to download as 
well, so this can't be considered an official binary distribution of them. 
Nevertheless I hope it is useful.

I didn't compile anything else as I found I was able to get all the other 
dependencies from GnuWin32 (http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/), i.e. 
libintl, libjpeg, libpng, zlib, libtiff, freetype, curses. No point in 
reinventing the wheel when they are already available in an easy-to-use 
format.

The 13MB file includes all the libraries and associated utility programs, 
source headers and import libraries etc. necessary for compiling. 
Obviously only the .dlls (and maybe even then not all of them) need to go 
into a GRASS binary distribution, so the size would be much smaller. It's 
normally useful though to include a couple of the main GDAL utility 
programs: gdalwarp, gdalinfo and so on. nad2bin from the PROJ distribution 
is required, and cs2cs is very useful.

I realise this is slightly different from the approach Marco is taking, in 
that I'm directing people to GnuWin32 for the stuff that they have 
available already - again that's just laziness on my part really but I 
think it will be less work in the future.

The great thing about this now is that we can include the Tcl/Tk DLLs in 
the binary distribution and don't have to ask people to install a separate 
Tcl/Tk any more.

Also I don't have a lot of time to maintain this either, but if someone 
wants to run a relatively stripped-down WinGRASS and compile it themselves 
it might just be useful, so I thought I'd put it out there to complement 
Marco's work.

Paul