[winGRASS] Building LIBGIS (GRASS60beta1) under MINGW

[Javier A. Yebrin]

(cc grass5)

Thanks Thomas for your support and comments. 
I'm not a programmer so I find it very difficult to understand how to get
this working. 
If you can give me some additional hints, specially for the problem with
wait.h and its functions, I'll be very much happy.
I extend this request to the GRASS developers list, as I believe they could
contribute to this quest just with a little effort. 
Thanks in advance.

Javier


> -----Original Message-----
> From: wingrass-admin at grass.itc.it 
> [mailto:wingrass-admin at grass.itc.it] On Behalf Of Mike Thomas
> Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2005 10:36 PM
> To: Javier A. Yebrin
> Cc: wingrass at grass.itc.it
> Subject: Re: [winGRASS] Building LIBGIS (GRASS60beta1) under MINGW
> 
> 
> 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.
>