[Libnifalcon-devel] Windows compiling

[Kyle M. (qDot) <ky...@no...>]

github is down! Thank god it's git, or otherwise I'd be losing 
development time. Anyways, good excuse to write some email.

Well, for a brief moment, I had a working windows machine. :) I 
bootcamped my iMac with XP Pro, which worked beautifully for a couple of 
days, until I just tried rebooting it and it now blue screens on boot. 
So much for that. :)

Anyways, while I had it working, I got some time to get the windows 
build system in order. In order to not have to build my own Visual 
Studio files (and even worse, to not have to deal with getting cmake to 
crank out correct ones), I decided to give MinGW a shot, and it worked 
great, though with a couple of issues that are worth pointing out here 
so I can have them documented somewhere, at least.

The main problem is that Cmake isn't really sure where to look for 
includes/libs with MinGW, so you have to feed them to it yourself. I 
ended up building boost 1.37.0 through mingw, and using the mingw dir 
(c:\mingw) as the install prefix. I also had to change the include 
directory to be named boost instaed of boost_1-37, but that's common 
across all platforms until FindBoost from cmake gets more flexible.

I threw the FTD2XX includes/libs into the mingw include and lib 
directories also. Then, to get everything to build, I had to give cmake 
some hints on what to use, so the cmake line ended up looking like

cmake -G "MSYS Makefiles" -DBoost_ROOT=c:\mingw 
-DLIBFTD2XX_INCLUDE_DIRS=c:\mingw\include 
-DLIBFTD2XX_LIBRARIES=c:\mingw\lib\ftd2xx.lib

I used MSYS Makefiles 'cause I also had msys installed. MinGW make users 
can just change the generator and things should still work fine.
 
Using that setup, cmake was able to find everything just find, and built 
all the utilities/examples even. I ran a few tests with falcon_test_cli, 
and got good results. Checked everything in, rebooted, and the partition 
would no longer come up. Ah well. :)

So, for anyone that's interested in getting this together on windows, 
that should work for you. I'm still determined to have some sort of 
working windows installation /somewhere/ so I can keep all the platforms 
in sync, it's just proving to be somewhat difficult. :)