[Liblas-devel] Building under VS2010

[Howard Butler]

On Nov 19, 2010, at 6:30 PM, Michael Gerlek wrote:
> So, for the record, a couple lessons-learned.. not all of these may be
> required, but they all seemed to help a little bit at various times
> throughout the day:
> 
> (1) Use the cmake gui or the command line tool, but not both.  And
> remember to thoroughly delete your caches when you start fooling
> around with things you don't really understand.

In my experience, both the command-line tool and gui can be used interchangeably, but the advice about clearing caches is definitely true.  I've found that CMake caches some things on first run and they seem to "stick" no matter what I do through the gui or command call to try and override them.  

> 
> (2) In fact, don't use the cmake gui.  Just make your own copy of
> hobu-config.dat and use that instead.

hobu-config.bat is a great way to start.  I will probably give this a more general name and show people how to use it by default on <http://liblas.org/compilation.html> (the docs existed before the .bat file). For a standard windows build against an OSGeo4W set of libraries, it's the easiest way to go.

> 
> (3) Make sure your include paths reference the osgeo4w gdal-dev
> include world first, and then the regular osgeo4w include world.  This
> will solve your problems with SetEquirectangular2.  Do the same for
> your library paths too, just in case.

Mateusz,

I have commented out the test for SetEquirectangular2 for now.  It seems that check_function_exists can fail sometimes even though it shouldn't, and when it does, it doesn't give us an error message that is very helpful.  If someone compiles against an old GDAL, they're going to get an error we can more easily recognize and diagnose.  Make sense?

> 
> (4) Don't even try to build Oracle support until you've gotten
> everything else working first.

Oracle support requires GDAL and libgeotiff (and OCI too, of course).  This is provided right now by OSGeo4W if you check the right boxes.

> 
> (5) You only need to download the Boost libraries for serialization
> and program-options -- none of the other libs.  Really.  And in
> theory, you need to only pull down the multithreaded/static versions,
> but I wound up bringing down all the versions before I was done.
> 

I presume you're talking about boostpro.com downloads here.  

> As my father always used to say, "It's easy, when you know how."

Thanks for the report.  Hopefully it gives others confidence that the process isn't too terrible :)