[Mesa-dev] windows build experience

[Jose Fonseca]

----- Original Message -----
> On 03/04/2012 10:54 PM, john grant wrote:
> > Hello,
> > I wanted to use Mesa on Windows so that I could spend a little less
> > time at the office. I do not have the hardware at home for the GL
> > extensions I want to work with. After several package installations
> > and adjustments to my system PATH to accommodate Mesa's build
> > system,
> > only to see build errors, I have come to the conclusion that it is
> > very difficult to use Mesa on Windows. The number of dependencies
> > required just to build Mesa seems to be the biggest hurdle.
> >
> > I've spent a few days porting the Scons build system to CMake. My
> > idea
> > is that the use of CMake can make building on Windows more natural
> > by
> > generating a build system (IDE project files) that I'm used to.
> > I've
> > used Scons before, but this is my first experience with CMake.
> > CMake
> > seems pretty easy to use, with the exception of working with Lex
> > and
> > Yacc, which I'm not experienced with either. CMake can generate
> > source
> > code as well, so it should be possible to remove the (undocumented)
> > requirements for Flex and Bison.
> 
> I don't see how CMake would remove the need for Flex/Bison.
> 
> 
> > In an ideal world, the generated IDE
> > project and GNUmake files could be distributed so no one needs to
> > install CMake either.
> 
> I don't think that's feasible since one of the jobs of CMake, SCons,
> and autoconf is to determine what libraries/dependencies are present
> on the build system and generate Makefiles tailored to them.
> 
> 
> > Is the Mesa community interested in a CMake build system?
> 
> Probably not.  We've got autoconf and SCons already.

I agree. For the record, CMake was attempted before scons, and it didn't meet our requirements then.
 
> > It seems to
> > be the most popular build system these days for cross platform,
> > open
> > source projects. I would be happy to contribute what I've done so
> > far,
> > but the use of Lex and YACC for the glsl support is incomplete. If
> > I
> > can't wrap this up soon, I think I'll just have to leave the CMake
> > system for someone else to complete because life is too short.
> >
> > Is anyone interested in helping me make the build system on Windows
> > (and other platforms) easier to use?
> 
> If we could simply improve the documentation in this area, that would
> probably be enough.
> 
> I've had my windows environment set up here for quite a while so I
> don't recall the specifics after installing python, scons, flex,
> bison.  But it's been working for a while.  I don't have the time
> right now to recreate things from scratch.
> 
> If you keep at it, and manage to get things working, please send your
> notes so that the docs can be improved.

I got it working once too, and then forgot about it.

bison can be obtained from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ But flex dependency is a bit nasty, as flex-2.5.35 is required I could not find recent native flex binary available from _anywhere_.

I used cygwin's flex. It's not necessary the full cygwin setup -- just flex.exe and the DLLs it requires. For example, http://www.postgresql.org/ftp/misc/winflex/

MSYS is equally good.


But re-searching and I found:

  http://sourceforge.net/projects/winflexbison/

If this works well, then we could simply refer to this on our docs.

Jose