From: Arjen M. <arj...@wl...> - 2005-03-07 08:08:03
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"Alan W. Irwin" wrote: > > On 2005-02-28 08:52+0100 Arjen Markus wrote: > > > Two things though: > > - Would it be a good idea to _share_ source code between the two Windows > > drivers, rather than copy the code? > > That is: both need to figure out what fonts reside in the Windows > > system > > directory - I think it is a good thing to use the same algorithm for > > this. > > - As the win32 driver is not configured via the ordinary configure > > script, > > I need to figure out where the relevant libraries (gd and freetype) > > are > > (gd to support freetype in the PNG driver). How does configure find > > them on the Windows platform? > > The short answer is mingw is a minimalist GNU environment that has just > enough of GNU (which is Unix-like) so that the configure script which was > generated by autotools will work. Unfortunately, I cannot give you a real > answer to your difficult question because I don't understand the internals > of autotools. Instead, I use autotools like a black box; I follow the > documented recipes for configuring on Unix-like systems, and it (mostly) > just works. > > Arjen, there may be a possibility that you could get the autotools-generated > configure script to work directly on your windows platform without mingw or > (most of) Cygwin. To give you some background, I am going to quote the > entirety of section 2.6 of the autotools book (see > http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/autobook/autobook.html) on this question. > Alan, I have given this matter some thought, but the problem is that the current set-up of the win32 driver is making this a bit awkward: - The driver consists of several source files that Windows-specific as well as a definition file for the linker to export the various functions, and its own (!) version of plplot.h. (Ideally it should be merged into the general version, but that means everyone will see a lot of #defines and #undefs that are only important to this particular driver) - It is in particular this latter file I am a bit worried about. It would be necessary to replace the general version by this one (as in fact happens in the Windows makefiles) and then build the library. - Furthermore there are actually _two_ configurations to worry about: - the static/archive library - the dynamic link/shared library Right now this is done via the specific makefiles for each. I do not see how I can merge the steps now taken by these makefiles into the framework used by PLplot for those happy platforms that can use ./configure and friends, without knowing a lot more about it and spending considerable time. However, all is not lost: I can most probably use an alternative implementation of Tcl to implement a smoother configuration procedure. Its source distribution is only some 100 KB, and it can be built with a straightforward build command (as I only need a few capabilities, that ought to be enough). There will be no graphical user-interface - perhaps not quite what Windows programmers are used to - but it beats manually adjusting all manner of files. Regards, Arjen |