Help building under Windows7 64-bit

[Andrew John Hughes]

On 8 June 2010 09:26, Dalibor Topic <Dalibor.Topic at sun.com> wrote:
> cowwoc wrote:
>> There's no good reason for Windows builds to be this difficult...
>
> One of the major good reasons, in my personal, biased opinion,
> is that Windows, contrary to Linux or OpenSolaris, lacks a central
> software repository with all the necessary dependencies for a
> build that would make a 'standard' developer setup as trivial as
> it is on other, friendlier operating systems.
>

It also lacks a basic shell and tools by default, which is why you
need Cygwin to at least get you close to a normal UNIX environment.
It would surprise me if anyone could do development on a Windows
machine outside an IDE without Cygwin.

I've not looked at OpenCV but I would guess that's it's a pretty
normal library, and not on the scale of OpenJDK.  OpenJDK is a PITA to
build on a GNU/Linux system at times and those issues are only going
to be exacerbated on Windows.

This seems to be common with ex-proprietary codebases; I remember
having major issues building Firefox back in the day, and some of the
worst build systems I can think of other than OpenJDK are OpenOffice
and Chromium...

>> Have you looked at using cmake instead of cygwin?
>
> Cygwin is a 'Linux'-y environment for Windows. Cmake is a build
> system. They are not necessarily interchangeable.

If you took on the daunting task of rewriting all those Makefiles
using Cmake, you'd still need the same tools underneath.  If the
experience with Ant is anything to go by, it would actually make
things worse, as you bring in additional dependencies for CMake.
CMake is becoming common for a few GNU/Linux codebases and I've
noticed one annoying thing about it is that it gives very little
diagnostic output (at least in the way it seems to be commonly
configured).

>
> cheers,
> dalibor topic
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-- 
Andrew :-)

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