Re: no more PSPP for Windows?

[John Darrington]

[CCing pspp-dev@gnu.org]]

After Harry announced he was stepping down, I looked at the work he
had done, and integrated it into the master git branch.  The relevant
work is in a directory called Windows and IMHO is an elegant and
simple solution.  The whole procedure takes some time to run, but
runs unattended and non-interactively.

I see no reason why it would not work under Mingw, but have
not tried it - there might be small adjustments necessary but I would
not expect anything major, EXCEPT that finding a complete toolchain
for mingw might be difficult.   Having said that doing anything under Windows
is magnitudes more cumbersome than on a standard POSIX based system
so I wouldn't advise trying unless you are a real expert in Windows.

If anyone does wish to start building windows binaries, I would strongly
recommend doing it the way that has been tried and tested.  See the
information in the Windows directory of the source code.  If anything is
unclear or missing I will try to help solve those problems.

J'


On Sat, Sep 04, 2021 at 07:50:43AM -0600, ajk-eis wrote:
     Hello Harry,
     
     Thank you very much for that info.
     
     Yes, I can see that the procedure is somewhat cumbersome.  My goal would
     be to actually compile in the Windows environment (ideally with MS VS)
     because at that point future changes could be pulled from the GIT
     repository making future builds much easier.  In addition I have VMWare
     installed and can test at least the basic installation on both platforms
     (x86, x64).
     
     I'm hoping using the latest versions of MS VS and Install Aware can
     simplify the process but I don't know for sure.  Certainly it will take
     a bit of time to figure it out.  Thank you for pointing out the
     disadvantages of cygwin.  I would have preferred Mingw anyway but now I
     know why.  ;-)
     
     We'll see.  No promises yet.
     
     Al
     
     On 04.09.2021 04:35, Harry Thijssen wrote:
     > Hi Al
     >
     > Some info:
     >
     >   * The procedures I used to create my build environment can be found
     >     at
     >     sourceforge: 
https://sourceforge.net/projects/pspp4windows/files/BuildEnvironment/
     >     
<https://sourceforge.net/projects/pspp4windows/files/BuildEnvironment/>
     >   * The procedures I used to build a binary and installer can be found
     >     at: 
https://sourceforge.net/projects/pspp4windows/files/2020-09-05/used-in-build/
     >     
<https://sourceforge.net/projects/pspp4windows/files/2020-09-05/used-in-build/>
     >   * The main script to build on new binary is buildpspp4windows.pl
     >     <http://buildpspp4windows.pl>
     >
     >
     > In general there are 2 ways to go (at least these are the ways I know): 
     >
     >   * using cygwin
     >   * using Mingw
     >
     >  It might be possible (in the future?) to run GNU/Linux programs on
     > MSWindows, but I have my doubts about that.
     >
     > Using cygwin I did many years ago. And I can assure you that is a real
     > pain in the ass. Besides, you have to set a precondition of cygwin
     > installed at the users machine or install it. The latest might
     > interfere with existing installations. Besides, it was slow. 
     >
     > Mingw was what I used for the last 10+ years.
     >
     > Basically I create a crosscompile environment on a linux (openSUSE) os
     > and use it to build the PSPP binaries for MSWindows.  (It might be
     > possible to do this on MSWindows, but I doubt it will be easy.) 
     > When the binaries are created you can run them on openSUSE with Wine. 
     > After building the binaries I started building the installer. I
     > collected all the needed files in a temporary directory and let the
     > installer software create the installer. basically this is zipping the
     > directory and add some registry changes. 
     >
     > As I said I used the cross-compile environment with mingw which is
     > supported on openSUSE. These procedures use an inline compile which
     > means you place files in the directories where files of the cross
     > compile environment are already available.  Not clean but it works. 
     > The change made in the PSPP sources demand an external compile. -> I
     > can't use the cross-compile procedures, libraries etc available on
     > openSUSE.
     >
     > John published a procedure on how to create the cross-compile
     > environment and cross-compile with an external compile. Following that
     > with the installer procedures I used might work.  John included this
     > in make as far as I know.. 
     >
     > So I think the best way forward might be using John's procedures and
     > solving the issues which arise. My procedures can help and give a hint
     > how to solve them. 
     >
     > I hope this helps
     >
     > Stay safe
     >