[texworks] Building TeXworks on WinXP

[Stefan Löffler]

Hi Alain,

On 2009-01-12 21:11, Alain Delmotte wrote:
> I got the KDE stuff; the problem was to use the Package Manager
> install mode and MSVC compiler mode (I was using "End user").

OK, sorry for that. It's a habit of mine to alway choose "Expert" and
"Custom" modes ;). Besides I didn't write the procedure down straight
away because I wanted to find out if it would work, first.

> But I got errors running "qmake -t vcapp" on texworks:
> WARNING: Unable to generate output for:
> c:/texworks/texworks/Makefile.Debug (TEMPLATE vcapp]
> WARNING: Unable to generate output for:
> c:/texworks/texworks/Makefile.Release (TEMPLATE vcapp]
>
> and Texworks.vcproj was not created.
>
> NB. I downloaded the source of texworks *not* with an svn command, but
> just with svn update (I have Turtoise svn, but no ID)

This is interesting for a number of reasons:
1) Are you running this from a normal (Windows/Dos) command prompt (i.e.
choose Start -> Run and enter "cmd"). I'm asking this because qmake in
this mode shouldn't be producing any Makefile.* files (and hence
shouldn't be complaining about them, either). Moreover the notation with
"/" instead of "\" is odd (I get errors similar to these when running
qmake in windows mode on Linux).
2) Which version of qmake are you using? Did you install and use the Qt
version from the KDE on Windows project? In order to determine this run
"qmake -v" from the command line. It should tell you which version of Qt
is used and where it is installed. The version should be 4.4.3 (or
above, like 4.4.3-2).
3) As far as I know TeXworks doesn't (yet) come with a release version,
hence it's curious that qmake tries to create Makefile.Release. Could
you replace your local TeXworks.pro file with the one from
http://code.google.com/p/texworks/source/browse/trunk/TeXworks.pro, this
way any problems with the update process can be ruled out.

> NB. I had interferences from an old version of VBasic 2005 Express,
> further it did uninstall properly. But I don't think this could be the
> reason.
> If yes I'll try on another machine.

That shouldn't be a problem. I used the procedure on a machine where
both VC++2005 and VC++2008 were installed. qmake warned me about it, but
it worked.

> NB. This is the first attempt I am doing to "entrer dans la cours des
> grands" French expression more or less meaning trying to do what
> experts are doing.

Welcome to the world of programming/compiling, then :). It can be a
little tricky in the beginning, but once the system is running it should
be fairly easy.
NB: I wouldn't consider myself "un grand" ;).

As promised I also uploaded the version I compiled to
http://web.student.tuwien.ac.at/~e0325258/files/texworks/. I'm not sure
if it will work on all Windows systems (it did on mine, obviously). I'm
not sure either if you need the dlls (or if you can use the ones
Jonathan published on google).
NB: Use that program at your own risk. It still has the problem
mentioned in the build instructions that when run from within MSVC it
crashes with some memory corruption.

Please let's still try to figure out what your problem is as that might
help others in the future.

Stefan