#166 Patches for PyFoam 0.5.7 for working on Windows

[Bruno Santos]

Attached is a patch with the latest modifications we've made here at blueCAPE Lda (www.bluecape.com.pt) for making PyFoam work on Windows.

It's still far from a complete work, but most limitations are related to missing POSIX functions in the Windows version of Python itself.
Some of those can be fixed by using upgrading to Python 3, others require 3rd party Python libraries.

Summary of modifications:
* "uname" can/should be imported from "platform":
* hacks have been put into place where POSIX functions are missing on Python-Windows;
* identification for the Windows platform has been added;
* added script and batch file for installing PyFoam on Windows, so that it will work with both MSys and Windows Command Line.
* Some information is in the patch for continuing work on this.

---- additional_information ----
Sorry for the long delay in the release of these patches, but the internal review process took longer than I expected.

[Bruno Santos]

[Bernhard Gschaider]

Will try to apply the patches to my local copy (which has progressed a bit ... especially as the next release should be able to run on Python 2.x as well as 3.x)

[Bruno Santos]

Since this task is still open, I'll add a review of the past work already done and the new work now provided in attachment.

Already done in the past: Late in January 2013, we at blueCAPE Lda provided our modifications to make PyFoam work on Windows, at least up to the point where we were at that time. Those modifications were finally released in PyFoam 0.6.0, but 2 important details were left out:

• The files msyssetup.sh and winsetup.bat were missing from the SVN and tarball files that are provided in PyFoam.

• There were no installation instructions provided along with the modifications.

The files probably got lost in the process of adapting our modifications and we forgot back then to double-check the PyFoam versions that were being officially provided in each release.

Present work: A few weeks ago we were asked how PyFoam could be installed in our port of OpenFOAM for Windows, which lead us to investigate once again this topic. We noticed that the specific set-up files were missing and remembered that we endeded up not writing the installation instructions. This report now aims to fix this pending issue.

Attached are two files:

• The file PyFoam-Windows-0.6.3.patch provides a patch with the necessary changes to be applied to PyFoam 0.6.3.

• The file PyFoam-Windows-0.6.3_partial.zip provides the new and modified files relative to PyFoam 0.6.3.

Changes:

• Added the missing files msyssetup.sh and winsetup.bat, which have also been slightly updated.

• Added the new file README.Windows, along with updating the README file to reference the other file.

• Added the new files located at contribs/Windows, which is a shell script and a batch file which define the necessary environment variables for each working environment on Windows.

• We've also started a project at Github for supporting this endeavour, namely to continue the porting process of PyFoam for running on Windows: https://github.com/blueCFD/PyFoam