Re: [Podofo-users] Compile Windows

[Craig R. <cr...@po...>]

Edward Ross wrote:
>  Many thanks for the information.  I'm completely unfamiliar with mingw
> and cmake.  I've downloaded and installed and installed mingw, but I
> can't find cmake - could you let me know where I can get cmake for mingw
> please?

You do not need MinGW - you can and probably should use Visual Studio if
you're used to it and prefer it. Remember that C++ code is not binary
compatible between different compilers, so if you build your main app
with Visual Studio 6 you must also build PoDoFo with Visual Studio 6, as
explained in the "CMake builds with Windows" section of the README.

As for CMake - there's no "CMake for Visual Studio". CMake is standalone
and targets a variety of tools on each platform. I have failed to
document installing CMake as part of the PoDoFo install instructions -
partly because it's amazingly easy.

Go to cmake.org
Download the current CMake binary release
Install it

You're done. It auto-detects MinGW, various Visual Studio versions, etc;
no further setup should be required.

> Looking at the install instructions - I've tried the provided VS project
> files route already.  So I guess I'll now try generating Visual Studio
> project files with CMake.  But I'm a little confused by the second
> sentence  - are MinGW Makefiles the same thing as using CMake to
> generate Visual Studio project files?

No. MinGW is completely different to Visual Studio - it's a port of the
GNU C/C++ compiler to Windows.

The instructions cover several ways to build on Windows, because Windows
developers use a variety of tools and work in a variety of ways. In your
case, you want to use CMake to generate Visual Studio project files. You
don't need to have anything to do with MinGW.

> "On Windows, it is recommended that you use CMake to generate Visual Studio
> project files appropriate for your VS version and your libraries. You
> can also generate NMake builds or MinGW Makefiles (see "Installation with CMake").

Read "CMake builds on Windows" and "CMake builds on Windows with Visual
Studio" in the README. If anything is still unclear, let me know.

The point above could perhaps be more explicitly stated as:

"If your application or library uses Visual Studio, CMake can be used to
build a Visual Studio project you can use. Alternately, if you are using
MinGW for your existing code, CMake can make you a MinGW makefile to
build a mingw compatible version of PoDoFo."

> Alternately, Windows users can use the provided Visual Studio
> Solution/Project
> files after placing the other libraries in a directory inside of the podofo
> directory."

Yep, that's hopelessly out of date and has been removed from the current
development version, along with the project file referred to.

--
Craig Ringer