[Arianne-devel] installing libs on MSVC

[Ulrich E. <doo...@kn...>]

Hi Miguel, Hi folks!
I just read the additions you made to the HOWTO. I have to say that there is 
just one thing that is in my eyes wrong: you tell the user to copy SDL and 
other libs to a subdir of the arianne sourcetree and adapt the 
project-settings so that preprocessor and linker find these. 
 I have an alternative that makes these libs available for all projects. To 
achieve that, you first have to build and install the libs. Installing under 
win32 means copying the dlls to the system-dir or another dir in the path and 
the headers and .lib-files also to some place. The docs for eg LoadLibrary 
tell more on where windoze tries to find the dlls.
 The next step is that you add two directories to the MSVC-setup. These dirs 
can be set in the options-dialog, one is the include-dir the other is the dir 
where the linker searches the .lib-files. IIRC, you can optionally provide a 
source-dir there, too. 
(TODO: howto build debug-dlls of eg SDL and integrate them so that tracing 
works inside of them)
(TODO: transmit all the notes about installing and integrating the libs to 
the lib's maintainers)
 What is the difference between these two approaches? When you copy the libs 
to a subdir of the sourcetree, you have to do so every time you want to build 
a project with that lib. This consumes disk-space and time.
 Even worse, if you have n programs running, each of them linked to a copy of 
the same lib somewhere in its sourcetree, you also have n instances of this 
lib in memory. All the advantages that shared libs have over static libs are 
lost that way.
 My plead to you now: please reread if my instructions are clear or whether 
it should be explained with more detail and - most importantly - check if it 
works. I have not tested these instructions for Arianne, but I use the same 
procedure at work for Kithara and libSigC++.

btw: did you ever try compiling and running with cygwin ?

cheers
Uli