[STATSGRASS] Re: [GRASS5] CygWIN: compilation of current CVS HEAD?

[Mike Thomas]

Hi Roger, Glynn, Markus.

> > Mike Thomas <miketh at brisbane.paradigmgeo.com> has recently started
> > work on getting GRASS to compile with MinGW; however, I don't know how
> > far advanced this work is.

I compiled substantial portions of Grass using MinGW32 hosted under MSYS for
the configuration and build tools, but in doing so skirted over a number of
problems in libgis, most notably the socket communications stuff and the
database locking.   My initial aim is to get libgis built with whatever
parts are needed for external language/library bindings.

The reason for that limited initial aim is that Grass is tightly bound to
shell scripts which would all need to be supplied under Windows presumably
by Cygwin or by a complete rewrite of the scripting glue as batch files or
Tcl or whatever - a rather off-putting task.

I am very tight for time at the moment due to the impending release of a
Geolog beta at work and of Maxima and GCL at home, so I am not devoting the
time that Grass deserves at present, I'm sorry to say.

> Since the interface only needs a subset of libgis.a and really doesn't
> need libdatetime.a, it is possible that the files in src/libes/gis and
> src/libes/datetime could be put within #ifndef RGRASS_INTERFACE #endif
> to use an #ELSE /* RGRASS_INTERFACE */ to choose just the functions and
> variables needed - to permit a subset of the files and headers to be
> distributed with the package. I think this should be updated manually -
> there is no good reason why the main source should be altered. I would
> welcome advice on whether the CygWin GRASS / R / R interface user
> community is sufficiently large for it to be sensible to use time on this!

If you couild tell me, Roger, which parts of libgis you need, I'll make sure
they are prioritised as I think that the Grass/R interface is a very worthy
cause.  I suspect that you might already be OK unless the above two problem
areas are important.

Cheers

Mike Thomas.