[GRASS-dev] Fwd: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo4W maintenance activities

[Radim Blazek]

On Sun, Feb 21, 2016 at 4:19 PM, Markus Neteler <neteler at osgeo.org> wrote:
> FYI
> (ongoing discussion in the other list)
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: "Jürgen E." <jef at norbit.de>
> Date: Feb 21, 2016 4:14 PM
> Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo4W maintenance activities
> To: <discuss at lists.osgeo.org>
> Cc:
>
> Hi Markus,
>
> On Sun, 21. Feb 2016 at 15:47:00 +0100, Markus Neteler wrote:
>> since I'm not familiar with compilation on Windows, could you briefly
>> indicate what's needed / which efforts to compile GRASS GIS with MSVC
>> rather
>> than mingw given the recent efforts on the 64bit packaging?  Just to
>> better
>> understand...
>
> Not sure.  I'd probably start with moving the build system to CMake.  Like I
> already did for just the GRASS libraries at some point in the past (some
> code
> changes I submitted to make the libraries build with MSVC were also accepted
> back then).
>
> But moving all the modules there is probably a much bigger task and I'm also
> not sure about the acceptance of this. ;)
>
> It might also be possible to integrate msvc into configure/make (at least I
> think I've seen configures with MSVC stuff in them).  Although you'd still
> need
> a unix like shell, make and other tools from mingw/cygwin.  But I never
> explored that option (mainly just because the CMake approach went much
> better
> with what I needed for QGIS).
>
> But again GRASS works fine in OSGeo4W AFAICT (and as you know and that's
> still
> not much ;)) and hence I don't see the big problem of mixing MinGW and MSVC
> DLLs.

For the GRASS provider/plugin in QGIS (and any application using GRASS
libs)  it is really painful. Each has different size of off_t and
various hacks must be used to get it working, for example:
https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/blob/884c3ba8d/src/providers/grass/qgsgrassprovider.cpp#L101

Also, it is not possible to debug GRASS lib built with MinGW in an
application built with MSVC.

Radim


> It doesn't add much to the mess of having different MSVC compilers
> and
> runtimes around.   IMHO that part of Rashad's issue is just a CMake bug and
> not
> a fundamental flaw in OSGeo4W.
>
>
> Jürgen
>
> --
> Jürgen E. Fischer           norBIT GmbH             Tel. +49-4931-918175-31
> Dipl.-Inf. (FH)             Rheinstraße 13          Fax. +49-4931-918175-50
> Software Engineer           D-26506 Norden             http://www.norbit.de
> QGIS release manager (PSC)  Germany                    IRC: jef on FreeNode
>
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