[GRASS-dev] WinGRASS-6.3.0RC5 Self Installer

[Marco Pasetti]

 Hi,

I forgot to reply to *this* in the previous mail:

>Just looking at your building guide [2], I see that you do not do a 'make
install' but copy the files directly from the dist.* dir to $GISBASE.
Actually the 'make install' step is necessary as this corrects a series of
path issues in the files for windows. This might be the cause of your
problems with spaces (although I'm only guessing - I'll try to install my
package in a directory with spaces to test). Any specific reason why you did
not want to go through the make install step ?

Sorry, but it don't definetely depends on it. *make install* windows path
corrections are only for the selected installation, so, if you want to
install on another machine, you must repeat all those *corrections* starting
from build files folder; and its exactly what I did with my install script;
but it remains the fact that, if you select a installation dir with spaces,
it creates errors such as:

- No help pages from main help menu (no message displayed)
- No NVIZ (child process exited abnormally)

Marco

-----Messaggio originale-----
Da: Moritz Lennert [mailto:mlennert at club.worldonline.be] 
Inviato: giovedì 13 marzo 2008 11.51
A: Marco Pasetti
Cc: 'Glynn Clements'; 'Michael Barton'; grass-dev at lists.osgeo.org
Oggetto: Re: R: R: R: [GRASS-dev] WinGRASS-6.3.0RC5 Self Installer

On 12/03/08 21:32, Marco Pasetti wrote:
> Hi Glynn,
> 
>> Please note that, if you provide binaries which are covered by the 
>> GPL, you
> must provide the corresponding source code for download *from the same 
> place*. It isn't sufficient to point to the source on a different site.
> 

[...]
> 
> I think that this is a problem I should don't care, actually. I asked 
> the list if there were problems about that and I had the green 
> light... If you don't agree, I think you should discuss the matter 
> with other persons, I don't have the knowledge to neither reply nor
discuss it.

I don't think this is an appropriate answer. Glynn did not necessarily mean
that you are the one that has to host these files. In fact they should be on
the osgeo GRASS site next to the installer, but to just shrug it off this
way is not the way to go. Making sources available is a fundamental element
of free software.

Also, just to correct things a bit, this was discussed before, offlist:

On 29/02/08 18:02, Moritz Lennert wrote:
 > On 29/02/08 11:04, marco.pasetti at alice.it wrote:
 >
 >>  >This said, if we start to officially distribute binary packages with
>> the  >>  >libraries included, we also have to make the source code of all
these  >>  >libraries (and obvioiusly of GRASS) available...
 >>
 >> sorry, that's my fault... ;-) I meant only to prepare a self installer
>> of GRASS  >  > Well, de facto we are already officially distributing
packages, but they  > have been declared "experimental", so maybe we can
argue this as an  > excuse. I always meant to do the work you just did and
recompile  > everything and then keep the source code. I think that if you
could  > provide the binary package plus a directory which contains all the
> source tarballs you used and your compilation information, this would be
> perfect. If you rather have me host these files, I can do so as well.


So, to shorten a long discussion, I just used this simple command line to
download all the source packages mentioned in your guide:

for i in `grep "source code" BuildFromSource.html | awk -F'=' '{print $3}' |
awk -F'"' '{print $2}' | sort`; do wget $i; done

And I downloaded the msys, flex and bison sources manually.

Everything is available at
http://geog-pc40.ulb.ac.be/grass/wingrass/wingrass_sources/ including the
version of the GRASS sources you used (don't think this is necessary, but
just to be complete). All packages are available individually, and there
also is a wingrass_sources.tar which contains them all.

Maybe Markus can just get the tar and put it on the download site next to
the installer ?

I hope you understand that this is an attempt to make your work even more
perfect than it already is :-)

> 
>> What's the problem with spaces? If any part of GRASS can't handle 
>> spaces in
> filenames, that's a bug which should be fixed.
> 
> I think that forcing users to install GRASS in a "space free" dir is, 
> at the moment, the only solution to let us distribute winGRASS with a 
> simple "one-touch" installation procedure.

Again, I agree with Glynn: if there is a problem let's try to fix it and not
circumvent it. Your great installer will help a lot in getting people to
install and test GRASS on windows, but if we already force such "solutions"
on them, they will not be able to correctly detect the problem. Is there a
way of just making the installer print a warning, instead of breaking off
the installation procedure.

Just looking at your building guide [2], I see that you do not do a 'make
install' but copy the files directly from the dist.* dir to $GISBASE.
Actually the 'make install' step is necessary as this corrects a series of
path issues in the files for windows. This might be the cause of your
problems with spaces (although I'm only guessing - I'll try to install my
package in a directory with spaces to test). Any specific reason why you did
not want to go through the make install step ?

Moritz

[1]
- MSYS (1.0.11)
- Flex (2.5.4a-1)
- Bison (2.1)
- Zlib (1.2.3)
- Libpng (1.2.24)
- Libtiff (3.8.2)
- Xdr (4.0)
- Freetype (2.3.5)
- FFTW (3.1.2)
- PDCurses (3.3)
- PROJ.4 (4.6.0)
- GEOS (2.2.3)
- PostgreSQL (8.2.6)
- SQLite (3.5.6)
- GDAL (1.5.0) *
- Tcl/Tk (8.5.1)

[2] http://www.webalice.it/marco.pasetti/grass/BuildFromSource.html