[Developers] How to build admb source with mingw 64 - finally!

[Cooper, Wade]

Hi Arni,

I've never used Rtools for building so can't comment on pros/cons.  It sounds like you've worked this out in an easier fashion so I'd be interested in experimenting if you could send a brief overview of how one would build the ADMB source using Rtools.

I work in Eclipse and remember having issues getting the Eclipse CDT working with the Rtools GCC a few years back.  Hence I switched to my current configuration (TDM, msys) mainly because it was the only way I could get 64bit Eclipse playing well on 64bit XP, and it worked for ADMB too.  Everything may work fine now since 64bit support in Windows is progressing a bit since XP. 

Wade


-----Original Message-----
From: Arni Magnusson [mailto:arnima at hafro.is] 
Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2013 12:04 PM
To: Chris Grandin
Cc: Jon Schnute; Cooper, Wade; John Sibert; Johnoel Ancheta; developers at admb-project.org; Rowan Haigh
Subject: Re: How to build admb source with mingw 64 - finally!

Hi all,

Good to hear that the Windows build is working smoothly now. Your efforts are appreciated by everyone, including me.

In July, I built both 32 and 64 bit ADMB using the GCC compiler that comes with Rtools. At that point I suggested we use whatever GCC is in the most current Rtools distribution as our main compiler. This suggestion was based on (1) successful compilation, (2) letting the R people [Murdoch, Ripley] do the hard work of finding the best GCC compiler for Windows, (3) R will be around for many more years, and (4) many people already have Rtools installed and in their PATH. The Rtools GCC also comes with gdb and some other useful tools.

Rtools is considerably smaller and feels more native than MSYS. If I remember correctly, MSYS comes with some medium-size programs, such as a Perl interpreter.

Can someone summarize the main pros and cons of Rtools vs. MSYS for building ADMB?

I appreciate the usefulness of MSYS for developers, but isn't it a bit too large to fit inside the ADMB-IDE installer?

Arni



On Tue, 10 Dec 2013, Grandin, Chris wrote:

> The 64-bit debug build also works perfectly. The 64-bit gdb.exe 
> debugger is included with mingw64 and works with the emacs IDE. 
> Whichever file we use for msys 64 is fine with me as long as it works!
>
> Arni had a problem with us using MSYS, I'm not sure what we can do 
> about that but I think it is more important to evolve the software to 
> 64-bit than to shelter some people from this.
>
> Jon - I have always used the shell because it ensures your commands 
> are the msys/mingw ones. For example windows has a find.exe command, 
> and you don't want your build to use this, you want it to use the 
> mingw find.exe. The source may build how it currently stands in DOS 
> but remember that some future changes could break this.
>
> If you want to try making the debug build, just do 'make debug' 
> instead of 'make' in the instructions I sent out.
>
> Cheers
> Chris
>