Re: [Plplot-general] Plplot on Mingw

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

On 2014-11-28 19:05-0700 Walt Brainerd wrote:

> Yes, it appears that this is a little complicated.
> I build static, but linking an application was missing
> a bunch of stuff.
>
> One more (last?) question:
>
> Do you have an idea why I get only the 6 drivers, when
> I get more building on Cygwin?
>
> I am happy with what I have, so thanks again for all the
> advice.

Many of our device drivers depend on external libraries:

qt depends on libQt4 (or libQt5)

cairo depends on the pango/cairo subset of the GTK+ stack of libraries

wxwidgets depends on the wxwidgets external library.

But MinGW/MSYS doesn't have any of those (so those device
drivers get turned off on that platform) while Cygwin does.

If you are game for some more experiments you might want to try
MinGW-w64/MSYS2 (both of which projects are completely independent of
MinGW and MSYS).  To put this in context, MinGW/MSYS is a fork of an
ancient and bug-riddent version of Cygwin, while MinGW-w64/MSYS2 is a
recent variant of the latest Cygwin but without its baggage, e.g., the
native Windows runtime is used.  So MinGW-w64/MSYS2 has the simplicity
of MinGW/MSYS without the bugs and with many more free software
libraries supported because the package building software for Cygwin
can easily be modified to build MinGW-w64/MSYS2 versions of the
packages as well.

Warning.... As you can tell I am very enthused about the
MinGW-w64/MSYS2 possibility for PLplot, but I cannot try it myself
(Wine bugs get in the way just like they do with modern Cygwin), and
our core developers with access to the Microsoft version of Windows
haven't had a chance yet to evaluate it because there is a lot to do
for the Windows platforms they are already working on.  So
MinGW-w64/MSYS2 might work like a dream for you with access to all the
same devices that are accessible on Cygwin or it might not because
none of our core developers have tried it yet.  But I think it would
definitely be worth your while to give it a quick try just to see how
far you get.

If you have further interest in this possibility, you can find how to
install MinGW-w64/MSYS2 at https://sourceforge.net/p/msys2/wiki/Home/.
Like MinGW/MSYS the Windows native runtime is used so I suggest you
use the native Windows CMake version you can download from Kitware (as
opposed to the Cygwin version of CMake) and also the "MSYS Makefiles"
generator to build PLplot.

> I found Inkscape, which will convert to some
> more formats.

Yeah, that should work for the limited device drivers available with
MinGW/MSYS, but, of course, best results are obtained with native
PLplot rather than converted PLplot results which is why I suggest you
give MinGW-w64/MSYS2 a quick try just in case it works right out of
the box.

Alan

__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state
implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); the Time
Ephemerides project (timeephem.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting
software package (plplot.sf.net); the libLASi project
(unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net);
and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net).
__________________________

Linux-powered Science
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