[bt-devel] Windows Build status

[Eeli Kaikkonen]

Quoting Greg Hellings <greg.hellings at gmail.com>:

> So the Windows building was, not surprisingly yet disappointingly, not
> nearly as smooth as the Mac build.  I have built Qt 4.4.3 for both
> Visual Studio and MinGW tool chains.  Likewise I have built CLucene
> for both tool chains.  SWORD also builds on both systems once you
> either put together a basic MinGW/MSYS system (I used some of the
> directions from the wiki on how to build Xiphos on Windows, but I took
> great liberties and really only went so far as to install the
> libraries that he suggested - I did install the Technology Preview
> versions and they seem to work just great).

We should somehow make this as easy as possible for newcomers. Maybe a  
zip package which includes all the tool and library packages?

>  I am sure I could build
> ICU under Visual Studio as well, since that is an officially supported
> system for them (and there are also .dll files that someone else in
> the SWORD project world has either acquired or built themselves that
> could be used).

It's still not clear to me how icu is used in SWORD.

> Using CMake I was able to configure BibleTime for use
> with Visual Studio 2008, since I find that programs built with the
> native compiler tend to be much better at their jobs than those built
> with a compiler that's been shoe-horned into the system.

It may be better to build the binary releases with a native compiler,  
but for open source developers it's important to have a free toolchain  
for development.

> The
> following errors manifest themselves:
>
> strcasecmp - the case agnostic string comparison function is called
> stricmp on Windows.  Change the name and it works marvelously
> (probably a simple #define macro could work perfectly, even in
> config.h.cmake).

Yes.

> pthread.h - no such file in Visual Studio 2008, although there is an
> open source implementation of pthread-win32, its latest release is
> 2006 and I haven't tried to build it in Visual Studio.  Qt3 had the
> option of no threading - so it made sense to use pthread back then,
> when there may not have been support in Qt.  However, according to
> Trolltech's Qt4 Thread page, it is always enabled in Qt4, so it might
> be a smart idea to move to using Qt-only for threads.  pthread.h does
> exist for MSYS/MinGW, though, so that is a possibility.

You didn't say where this is. Is it really in BT code? We shouldn't be  
using it.

> dirent.h - there is also no such file in Visual Studio, though there
> is in MinGW.  Just glancing through the Qt4 documentations, use of the
> QDir object would allow the same functionality that is being used in
> CSwordBackend::moduleConfig.  As in the case of pthread, it's probably
> desirable to move to using all native Qt functions rather than
> non-Standard  system headers like dirent.h.  But I don't think that I
> quite grasp the exact functionality at this hour, so I will refrain
> from trying to submit a patch for that.

I have noticed that earlier. Yes, we should bet rid of that, though I  
think it's available for Windows, see  
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirent.h.


> BT_VERSION - this is normally defined in config.h, but it doesn't
> appear to have been in the version of config.h which was included to
> its references in the source in main.cpp, migrationutil.cpp and
> bibletime.cpp.  I manually moved the bibletime-svn/src and
> bibletime-build/ include lines to the top of Visual Studio's include
> lists for the include search, and this error went away.  I presume VS
> was pulling in a config.h from Qt or something like that.
>

We could rename our file to bt_configuration.h, there should be no  
problem in that.

> Other, miscellaneous errors which only seem to appear in Visual Studio
> in only two places:
> 2>..\bibletime-svn\src\frontend\settingsdialogs\clanguagesettings.cpp(98)
> : error C3083: '{ctor}': the symbol to the left of a '::' must be a
> type
>
> 2>..\bibletime-svn\src\frontend\cinfodisplay.cpp(239) : error C2040:
> 'i' : 'Rendering::CTextRendering::KeyTreeItem *' differs in levels of
> indirection from 'int'
> 2>..\bibletime-svn\src\frontend\cinfodisplay.cpp(246) : error C2440:
> '=' : cannot convert from 'Rendering::CTextRendering::KeyTreeItem *'
> to 'int'
> 2>        There is no context in which this conversion is possible
> 2>..\bibletime-svn\src\frontend\cinfodisplay.cpp(254) : error C2440:
> '=' : cannot convert from 'Rendering::CTextRendering::KeyTreeItem *'
> to 'int'
> 2>        There is no context in which this conversion is possible

We have to fix these. They are probably minor things.

>
> So, while I have a built and ready-to-go version of Bibletime on my
> Mac that I was happily using today, Bibletime on Windows is slightly
> further out, though not insurmountably so.  The goal is within
> eyesight!
>

Now I really hope I had time today, but I don't.

--Eeli Kaikkonen