On Sun, 25 Oct 2015, Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti wrote: > The following piece of conversation somehow dropped off-list, but > IMO is of general interest, so I'm re-posting it. > > On Sun, 25 Oct 2015, Logan Kelly wrote: > >> I saw an older post about building under Windows, but there was a >> need for someone to maintain the system. If this is something of >> value, I'm willing to help. However, I haven't had any problems >> with the snapshot not being updated quickly enough. So maybe the >> marginal benefits are limited.
I do think the marginal benefit is limited, but in case anyone is interested in building gretl from git on MS Windows, here are a few thoughts. First, should you use MSVC or a GNU-like alternative? And if the latter, which alternative? My recommendation is to use mingw. I successfully built gretl using mingw on Windows a few years back, so I know it can be done. Cygwin might be OK too, but if you want a build that can be distributed to other Windows users you'd have to be careful not to build in any cygwin-specific dependencies. MSVC is unknown territory for me. In principle it should be possible to build gretl using MS proprietary tools but I can't offer any help on that. In the gretl source tree there's a "win32" subdirectory that contains various files relevant to a Windows build using mingw. These files are set up such that you can choose between "cross" (which I use, compiling for Windows on Linux) and "native". See in particular "Makefile" and "mkwindist". On the gretl server at WFU there's a directory "winbuild" -- http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/pub/gretl/winbuild/ -- with some material that was potentially helpful about 3 years ago ;-) If anyone is seriously interested in trying a gretl build on Windows I could update that material. Otherwise, doing so is not a good use of my time. Allin
