[gps-users] Building on Windows

[Juanma Barranquero]

On Sun, 7 Dec 2003 10:18:22 +0100, Arnaud Charlet <charlet@ACT-Europe.FR> wrote:

> Sure. I'd suggest you continue asking your questions on gps-devel which
> is more appropriate for this kind of questions.

Ok, you're right.

> INSTALL gives all the instructions needed. And in particular that you
> need a set of unix-like tools indeed (cygwin is what we use).

Well, you're right, in a sense. As INSTALL does not mention Windows,
Cygwin, MinGW or the like, just gzip, tar, configure, make and other
Unix tools, it can be deduced that Unix tools *are* needed.

But I would have appretiated a section like:

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BUILDING ON WINDOWS

To build GPS on Windows you need a Unix toolset for Windows. Two
excellent such toolsets are Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com) and MinGW
(http://www.mingw.org).

Cygwin has a bigger feature set, and the installation procedure is very
easy to follow. On the other hand, you'll have to select what packages
do you want to install and, depending on what you choose, it takes a lot
more space. Moreover, Cygwin is very Unix-oriented (it doesn't
understand Windows-style paths, for example), so you'll need at least a
basic bash proficiency.

To build GPS on Windows you'll need, at the bare minimun, the following
Cygwin packages:

 - autoconf
 - make
 - [etc...]

MinGW is a more streamlined product. In order to configure GPS, you'll
need to download a recent MinGW package, and MSYS, a sister
configuration-tools package. Installing MinGW and MSYS is easy (just run
the installers), but you'll have to decide beforehand which ones you
need, and with MinGW that's sometimes not easy.

To build GPS with MinGW we recommend [etc...]

The current binary for Windows distributed through
http://libre.act-europe.fr/gps is built with Cygwin.

If you have any doubt, please post a message to the GPS developers list,
that you can reach on http://lists.act-europe.fr/mailman/listinfo/gps-devel.

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> Follow the instructions to the letter unless you know what you are doing
> is the best advice I'd say.

Ok.

Thanks,


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