[Liblas-devel] Building under MinGW on Windows

[Howard Butler]

Will,

MinGW is not a "supported" compiling environment for libLAS for a few reasons.  First, none of libLAS' developers are MinGW users. Those of us who work on windows use at least MSVC Express Edition.  Second, there are frequently assumptions in the codebase, including both libLAS and GDAL, of WIN32 == MSVC.  You might find instances of #ifdef WIN32 causing MSVC code to be run (and in turn causing MSVC to be called in the MinGW case too when it shouldn't).  

If you're willing to work through these issues to get a MinGW build working (you've got a MinGW Boost build to deal with too -- seems this is at least supported in theory), we'd happily take patches to bring things up to date.  No one is going to do the work to keep them up to date, however, as no one is a daily MinGW user.  This is always the challenge with using non-incumbant compilers in open source projects.

Howard


On Dec 8, 2010, at 11:50 AM, Angley, William [USA] wrote:

> Mike,
> 
> I’m getting the MinGW environment because it’s the only way to obtain an up-to-date version of GNU Wget on Windows.  The GnuWin32 project is only providing out-of-date binaries with security vulnerabilities.
> If I can build liblas with it, I can get rid of Visual Studio.  I’ve got a pretty resource-constrained machine and VS is injecting unwanted debugging behaviors into Windows that I don’t want and don’t understand how to disable.
> If I can’t build liblas with it, I don’t want to waste my time or anyone else’s trying to make it work on MinGW, and I’ll keep going as is.   I have a working VS build, so this is not an urgent request by any means. 
> 
> Thanks again,
> 
> -- Will
> 
> From: Smith, Michael D ERDC-CRREL-NH [mailto:michael.smith at usace.army.mil] 
> Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2010 12:33 PM
> To: Angley, William [USA]; Liblas-devel at lists.osgeo.org
> Subject: Re: [Liblas-devel] Building under MinGW on Windows
> 
> Will,
> 
> Any particular reason to build under MinGW as opposed to using Visual C++?
> 
> Mike
> 
> 
> -- 
> Michael Smith
> Remote Sensing/GIS Center
> US Army Corps of Engineers
> Hanover, NH
> 
> 
> 
> On 12/8/10  12:29 PM, "Angley, William [USA]" <angley_william at bah.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi liblas developers,
> 
> I’m going to be getting a MinGW environment set up on my computer shortly and will probably try to build liblas with it sooner or later.  Has anyone tried this before, and if so, how did it work out?
> 
> The official liblas.org instructions assume that you’re building with the Microsoft Visual C++ compiler if you’re on Windows, and don’t seem to speak to MinGW one way or the other.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -- Will
> 
> William Angley III
> Sr. Consultant
> Booz Allen Hamilton
> 575 Herndon Parkway
> Herndon, VA 20170
> Tel. (703) 377-9104
> angley_william at bah.com
> 
> 
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