gEDA: gschem and friends / Cygwin

[Ales Hvezda <ahvezda@seul.org>]

Hi All,

I'm sure I will regret this, but here it is anyways:

Announcing the first binary release (20001217) of gschem and friends (gaf) 
on Win32 platforms (using Cygwin).

I have only tested it on WinNT4 and on nothing else, so if people want,
please test on other Win32 platforms (and let me know of your success).
As far as I can tell, everything works and I haven't seen it die yet.
If you see it die, please let me know.

Here are some known issues:

- Since Win32 is click to focus, you many find the "autoraise" of some 
  of the dialog boxes (like the add text dialog box) making the app
  unusable.  You can disable this behavior by putting:
	(raise-dialog-boxes-on-expose "disabled")
  in a *gschemrc file.

- I think I got the win32 build of guile to work with regex (it wasn't easy),
  but there still might be some unknown issues.

- There seems to be some sort of wierdness if you try to browse the c:\, but
  I haven't seen this for a while.

- All the unix issues are now win32 issues :-) 

- You do not need an X server to run this port.  It uses GTK+ for win32 for
  the GUI.

- I'm not including the gtk/glib devel headers, so if you want them, please
  let me know.  You can also download them from the official gtk+/win32 
  site.  Also, if somebody wants my source tree, please let me know as well.

- The GTK+ for win32 author warns extensively against mixing cygwin runtime
  and the win32 GTK+ libraries (which use the mscvrt.dll or whatever runtime
  library).  Seems to work for me, but could break at anytime.
  
- No, I'm not going to turn to the dark side, the Unix port is still my 
  main priority (and always will be).

- No, I'm really not supporting this port, it's just there; if it works, 
  that's great, if it doesn't work, convince me that it's a problem in
  the unix side of things as well. 

You can get it from:

http://www.geda.seul.org/devel/win32
ftp://ftp.geda.seul.org/pub/geda/devel/win32

It's a big file:

 geda-cygwin-20001217.zip    21-Dec-2000 21:32   3.6M  

I should warn everybody, this is a Cygwin port of an Unix application.
It is NOT a "true" Win32 application (ie it shouldn't mess with your
registry or such).  It behaves just like the Unix version of gschem
and friends (with all the bugs and inefficiencies).

For those people who actually want to build the code themselves, you
can find fairly detailed instructions at (in CVS):
http://cvs.seul.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/eda/geda/devel/README.win32
(click on the 1.9 or download link)

Anyways, I am distributing this binary release as a .zip file.  You should
not need any other libraries to run.  All you need is the .zip file and
to follow these instructions:

1) Grab geda-cygwin-version.zip and unzip it into c:\   At this stage
   in the game, it really must be in c:\  Unzipping the zip file should
   create a directory called "geda" (c:\geda)

2) Set the following environment variables:
        TMP     (some temp directory, say C:\TEMP , make sure this dir exists)
        HOME    (some home directory, say C:\ , make sure this dir exists)
        (hopefully no other vars)

3) Added c:\geda\bin to your PATH variable

4) Run gschem by typing: gschem  in a cmd window.  It should run.  If not
   please e-mail ahvezda@geda.seul.org with the error message.  You can
   also create a shortcut on the desktop to the binary, just change the
   Run option to run "minimized" if you don't want to see the console.


I wish all applications under Win32 were distributed like this (a zip 
file which expands into a single directory which can be removed with
one command and doesn't pollute anything), though right now you can't
have more than one version of gaf installed at a time (will fix somehow
later).  I have tested this on a totally fresh install of NT4.0 with
almost nothing installed (you do not need to install cygwin).

For those interested, I have developed this port completely under Linux
(well, unless you consider running WinNT in vmware not under Linux. :-)
The next step will be to build a cross complier to target cygwin, but
I think the vmware solution works okay for now.

Have fun, and please don't blame me if your Win32 machine is eaten alive
by this port (you have been warned).

Happy Holidays and a have a grand New Year.  I should be back into gEDA
development after the New Year.

								-Ales