RE: [Axiom-developer] build-improvements on cygwin

[Bill Page]

On November 27, 2006 10:11 AM Gaby wrote:
> ... 
> | > 
> | > Well, I installed all I would find on mingw website.  The 
> | > configure for GCL-2.6.8pre failed because it could not find
> | > some of the basic standard headers.
> | 
> | I built GCL and AXIOMsys on Windows recently (last month). It
> | should still work. How to setup MSYS/MinGW to compile GCL and
> | Axiom is described here:
> | 
> | http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/BuildAxiom
> 
> As I said, installed all I could find on mingw webite labelled as
> current.

I have no idea if installing the packages marked current on the
mingw site will work, however I did test the following recipe on
the BuildAxiom page:

  [Install] In the following order:
 
    1. MinGW-5.0.3.exe
 
       This package will install mingw-runtime, w32api, GCC, binutils
       and mingw32-make. See the instructions for Getting Started
 
    2. MSYS-1.0.11-2004.04.30-1.exe
 
       This installation file contains basic Unix-style commands plus
       a commandline shell. See How to install MSYS
 
    3. msysDTK-1.0.1.exe

       This package provides common packages that are needed by
       developers.

> Configuring Axiom fails from the outset becaure there is no
> <regex.h> under mingw (there is one with cygwin).

If you are trying to build Axiom from build-improvements I am
sure that will fail because there are patches specfic to Windows
in the axiom--windows--1 branch that were never incorporated
into the axiom--main--1 branch from which build-improvements was
derived.

And of course under native windows you will not be able to build
all of the non-lisp components because some depend on X11 and
some require pty support neither of which is available on native
Windows.

But you can probably get at least some of the missing libraries
required by build-improvements from

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingwrep

In particular regex is here:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=7382&package_id=12650

> Attemping to configure GCL only also fails because some fundamental
> headrs are missing.  I can't copy-n-patse the error because: (1) the
> windows machine is separate from the one I'm using, (2) the windows
> machine is at home and there is no access to it from the outside.

I built gcl-2.6.8pre and Axiom (from axiom--windows--1) in September
as described here:

http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/axiom-developer/2006-09/msg00625.html
http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/axiom-developer/2006-09/msg00617.html

If you are serious about building Axiom on Windows, I would be glad to
repeat this to verify that it still works. I would really like to work
with someone to create a new release of Axiom for Windows. The Windows
version is extremely popular if you believe the download statistics but
there seem to be very few people willing to work on Axiom development
on Windows. :-(

> 
> I've a long day ahead of me, so I'll not return to Axiom matters
> before tonight.
> 
> | Once built, GCL call be called from cygwin if you wish. This
> 
> yes, I know.
> 
> | would be necessary for example to build the parts of Axiom that
> | depend on pty (like sman) since there is no pty under native
> | windows.
> | 
> | > Meanwhile, I learnt what -mno-cygwin can trick GCC to do.
> | > I'm falling back to that.
> | 
> | Yes, I think it should be possible to cross-compile from cygwin
> | but that seems like a lot of trouble. If you get this to work
> | then please let me know.
> 
> It is not much of cross-compilation.  Recent versions of cygwin
> include package for mingw.
> 

If you can make this work, great! Please keep me informed.

Regards,
Bill Page.