Re: [Plplot-general] Trying to build examples

[Arnaud D. <ada...@ap...>]

On 1/22/2015 10:12 AM, Alan W. Irwin wrote:
> On 2015-01-21 23:09+0100 Arnaud Darmont wrote:
>
>> Alan,
>>
>> thank you for the detailed answer. Cmake is what i'm trying to use.
>>
>> As i understand this won't be easy and i fear that there will be 
>> deployment difficulties on customer systems. My goal would be to 
>> distribute an executable of the final software along with the source 
>> so that they can just run it without any installation. Will in the 
>> end PLplot allow for this or is it the wrong library?
>
> I think your first priority should be to get the PLplot build to work
> on either Cygwin or MinGW-w64/MSYS2.  Both of those platforms should
> provide a full suite of external libraries that PLplot depends upon to
> provide complete functionality. 

We are not going to deploy anything like this on our customer's 
machines. It has to run in a windows install without any specific 
external requirements.

> Those external libraries include
> libqhull and shapelib (both needed by the core PLplot library for full
> functionality), libharu (needed for the pdf device driver), the
> wxwidgets library (needed by the PLplot wxwidgets device driver), Qt5
> (needed for the qt device driver), and the Pango/Cairo subset of GTK+
> (needed for the cairo device driver).  Note, that qt and cairo are
> currently our best device drivers, and one of our developers is
> working hard to bring our wxwidgets device driver up to that same
> level of quality.  I would avoid MinGW/MSYS because it supplies few
> libraries and therefore your PLplot build there will generate an
> extremely lite version of PLplot that doesn't have the capabilities
> (e.g., none of the wxwidgets, qt, or cairo device drivers) provided by
> the equivalent PLplot build on those other two Windows platforms.
>
> If you like the PLplot capabilities you find on either Cygwin or
> MinGW-w64/MSYS2, then I believe the answer to the deployment issue you
> brought up above is to build your software package against a static
> version of PLplot (which should be trivial to arrange) which in turn
> has been built against static versions of the external libraries
> (non-trivial to arrange). If you can do that, it virtually solves your
> deployment issues since you don't have to worry about version
> incompatibilities of ABI incompatibility issues with shared external
> libraries your users may or may not have installed, i.e., no dll-hell
> issues.
>
> My understanding is that CMake does have a method to force linking
> with static external libraries if they are available rather than
> external shared libraries (its default preference).  But I have never
> actually tried that myself, and you would likely have to ask on the
> CMake list or google for how to do it.
>
> In sum, my advice to solve the deployment issue is to abandon
> MinGW/MSYS (due to lack of external libraries) and try either/both
> MinGW-w64/MSYS2 or else Cygwin. If satisfied with one of those verify
> it has static versions of the necessary external libraries that you
> can install.  Then figure out how to convince CMake to preferentially
> use static libraries for linking, and build a static version of PLplot
> against those external libraries.  Then statically link your software 
> with
> that static PLplot for your deployment.
>

I will look for another plotting library. It will be less work.

> 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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