Re: gEDA-user: strange build failure

[Dan McMahill <dan@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mike Hansen wrote:

> You can also install cygwin under windows and install gEDA under 
> cygwin.   I believe there are a multitude of problems with this 
> arrangement so you will have to check docs.

I could be wrong but I thought things mostly worked there now.

> It would be great if there was a native Windows port of gEDA.   However 
> doing this would be a substantial effort and I would imagine most users 
> would want to see new efforts put into new features rather than a whole 
> new port.  And it appears most if not all of the developers for gEDA are 
> developers concentrating on the Linux platform.

Probably most developers use linux but a few of us don't.  However I 
think we can safely say that all of the developers are using a unix like 
operating system (linux, solaris, netbsd, osx, etc).

> Thus you aren't likely
> to get the current group to put any effort into a Windows port.  Perhaps 
> we can pull a new group of developers in from the Windows world to work 
> on the port(highly unlikely, I am a Windows developer and I have zero 
> desire to put any effort into this knowing the magnitude of the effort).

I think the magnitude of the effort (for some definition of "the 
effort") may not be too bad.

gnucap -- my guess is this is pretty simple to build with mingw and 
produce a windows binary that doesn't need cygwin.  Under cygwin I'll 
bet it "just works".  If someone wanted to build a windows installer 
that would probably be pretty easy and there is an example in the pcb 
tree.  Of course gnucap is a command line and text i/o program.  If you 
want a gui with menus and clicky things, well, they don't exist in gnucap.

pcb -- Should just work under cygwin.  The framework is all there to 
build a windows binary including a windows installer.  What is left to 
end up with something fully functional:

  - build the m4 libraries into newlib libraries at runtime.  This is 
easy, nearly all the framework is there.  I should make sure I've 
commited it.

  - use fopen() instead of popen() in a couple of places for file i/o. 
 This is probably also fairly easy.  I'm guessing a couple of hours or 
for someone slow like me a day.

gschem and gnetlist -- should just work under cygwin.  If not it should 
be pretty easy I'd guess.  In terms of a non-cygwin windows version I 
suspect it is basically not hard.... except for guile.  There I just 
can't comment on the magnitude of the work.  The kicker here is that 
gnetlist is a command line utility.  refdes_renum is a perl script. 
garchive is a python program.  All of these utilities (the "friends" 
part of gschem-and-friends) really want to have a unix sort of a shell 
and have things like perl, python, /bin/sh, etc. around.  I'll bet this 
is the bulk of the work.  Even if you ship a mingw bash shell, it won't 
look and feel like a gui point and click tool.

gwave -- good luck.  Probably works on cygwin, or could be made to work, 
but I'll bet guile-gtk for non-cygwin would be a major pain.

icarus verilog -- probably works out of the box on cygwin or at least 
would be easy.  In terms of mingw, the same comments as gnucap apply.


> A live CD version of gEDA would also be a welcomed addition.  Something 
> like Knoppix with gEDA installed.  That would be as painless as it 
> gets.  Forgive my stupidity if this already exists.

I started on that once with a NetBSD live CD but wasn't that interested 
to follow through on it.

-Dan



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