[winGRASS] Building LIBGIS (GRASS60beta1) under MINGW

[Mike Thomas]

Hi Javier.

Javier A. Yebrin wrote:
> Hi Glynn, 
> I'm sorry but my post was not clear. When I refer to MINGW it should be
> noted that it comprises also MSYS, which is a POSIX and Bourne shell
> environment. Of course it is not a complete environment such as CYGWIN,
> nevertheless I was able to run the configure script. The latter statement
> does'nt mean that then GRASS could be built... But I'll try to.
> 
> What really confuses me is the fact that there are a lot of "ifdef MINGW32"
> within the GRASS code. Does this mean Grass is expected to be built under
> MINGW?

A couple of years ago I built a Cygwin and X Windows free libgis with 
MSYS and MinGW32  (and many of the other parts of GRASS too).  My plan 
was to see if a pure Windows version of GRASS was feasible and also to 
bind to libgis from other languages than C/C++ - particularly Tcl and 
Haskell.

As it happened I got side tracked by work on Windows GNU Common Lisp 
with the aim of reviving the computer algebra system Maxima on Windows. 
  This has turned out to be a demanding project, spreading to Windows 
GCL support for ACL2 and Axiom (formerly known as IBM Scratchpad) on 
Windows.  Unfortunately I now find myself in a position where it is 
going to be difficult to back out of that work and so a purely Windows 
version of GRASS remains a dream at the moment (for me at least).  I 
have updated my CVS Grass source but twice in the past year!!

This is why those MINGW macros exist in libgis and why they are 
languishing without support.  If you check the CVS and mailing list 
records you may be able to track down details of how I went about that 
work - at the time most of the issues were not difficult to overcome.

I think that a pure Windows version of GRASS would be an admirable 
project; the main obstacles (when last I looked) being the dependency on 
Bourne shell driver scripts and the XDriver, both perhaps to be replaced 
with cross platform Tcl scripts and a Tcl display driver.

Cheers

Mike Thomas.


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