Re: [Plplot-devel] Deprecation of the MinGW/MSYS platform

[Arjen M. <Arj...@de...>]

Hi Alan,



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alan W. Irwin [mailto:ir...@be...]
> Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2016 1:20 AM
> To: PLplot development list
> Subject: [Plplot-devel] Deprecation of the MinGW/MSYS platform
>
> For a variety of reasons discussed below I think it is time (unless someone strongly
> objects) for us to deprecate the MinGW/MSYS in favour of MinGW-w64/MSYS2
> and other Windows alternatives.
>
> One advantage MinGW/MSYS can still claim is libraries such as PLplot built on that
> platform are native Windows libraries and do not depend on any special dll such as
> the Cygwin dll that is a required dependency for all software built on Cygwin.  But
> that advantage is no longer unique to MinGW/MSYS because MinGW-w64/MSYS2
> (a completely independent project with different developers than the ones who are
> still supporting MinGW/MSYS) shares that same advantage.
>
I am not completely sure that programs built with MinGW-w64/MSYS2 are indeed independent of an installation of this platform. At least they are not for a default build. I checked this with one of the C examples: it requires LIBWINPTHREAD-1.DLL and LIBSHP-1.DLL (it seems to be from the Shapelib library, so not a system DLL) to be present in the path (of course you can include these in the PLplot distribution).

It might be a good idea to find out if the reference to LIBWINPTHREAD-1.DLL can be eliminated via a static version of that library. Then I think the program will be entirely independent of the MinGW-w64 installation. A first glance at the available static libraries indicates that this is not impossible. It will be a matter of finding the right compile/link switches.

Apart from this: I agree that the MinGW/MSYS platform is not to be recommended, if only because of the severe lack of package management.

Regards,

Arjen

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