2007.06.29 11:04 "[Tiff] Suggested Source Changes for Building libtiff Under Windows", by Kevin Myers

2007.06.29 18:18 "Re: [Tiff] Suggested Source Changes for Building libtiff Under Windows", by Kevin Myers

Hi Frank,

Thanks for your reply.

Regarding separate handling of GnuWin32 issues, no problem. I will find a way to contact those folks separately. I just assumed that some of the people who maintain their port of libtiff would read this list as well.

Regarding the changes to tif_config.h.vc, there are basically two types of changes in there:

  1. Changes and additional settings that were required in order for the build to complete propertly without errors or warnings when using the MSVC compiler. In the end, this was a relatively small number of changes, probably less than half a dozen.
  2. Additional settings that resulted from running configure (under MinGW) to generate appropriate settings for an x86 machine running Windows. My justtification for these changes is much weaker without further review. I will attempt to break these groups of changes out separately and provide better justification.
  3. Regarding the items in the contrib subdirectory, no building them isn't a necessity, but if you are going to include their source code in your distribution then doesn't it make sense to also include the necessary code to build them? However, I must certainly admit that this is far from a critical issue where my own usage is concerned. Perhaps you are right and this isn't worth the additional maintenance effort.
  4. Regarding Bugzilla, will do as soon as I get a chance.

Regards,

Kevin M.

Subject: Re: [Tiff] Suggested Source Changes for Building libtiff Under Windows

Dear libtiff maintainers,

I've just spent most of the past two days struggling with getting libtiff to build successfully under Windows. During the process, I came across what I believe to be a number of deficiencies in the present source code that could be addressed in order to simplify builds under Windows. Following below are a number of specific suggestions that I believe would be helpful in this regard. Note that I have successfully built libtiff under Windows using the MSVC compiler with all of the changes in place that are suggested below.

I hope that someone will be able to implement these changes. There are both standard libtiff and GnuWin32 specific issues. I believe that addressing these issues would make builds under Windows a lot easier, especially for folks like me who don't do this kind of thing on an everyday basis.

The libtiff maintainers do not maintain the GnuWin32 builds for libtiff, so we are unlikely to be able to help with this aspect.

I think the proposed values for tif_config.h.vc could use some justification.

Why should we extend the build to build stuff in the contrib directory? It is all quite non-essential.

In general the suggested changes should be submitted via the libtiff Bugzilla to improve the likelyhood of them being considered carefully. I'd suggest you segment the changes into 2-3 bugs. One for all the tools include file changes for instance.

and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org