[texworks] Building on Windows 7

[Stefan Löffler]

Hi,

Am 2010-02-23 22:19, schrieb Casey P. Johnson:
> I kind of guessed it was a 64-bit issue (...) I will
> stick with 32-bit for the time being. I agree that there seems little real
> motivation at the moment for trying to go 64-bit with TW.
>
> Another thing I have wondered (and a post you made a couple of days ago,
> directed at Jonathan, recalled it) is: Would it be much work for me to do
> a build similar to his distributions?

That depends on your proficiency with building programs and your
definition of work ;).

Instead of using KDE on Windows (which distributes shared files, i.e.
dlls) you'd need to build the libraries yourself. Most prominently this
means building Qt and poppler (I'm not quite sure if others would be
required, too). Building Qt should be straight-forward, albeit
time-consuming. You just need to make sure that you don't build the
shared version of Qt.
As for poppler, building it normally requires a lot of other libraries.
There is a patch included in the poppler-patches folders that should
limit this. For using patches on Windows, I recommend taking a look at
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/ (in particular the "patch" package) or
possibly to use MSYS.

So, I think it should be possible to build Tw into a single file, but
I've never done it before. If you attempt it and run into problems, just
drop Jonathan or me an email, maybe we can help (though I think Jonathan
cross-builds the windows files from Mac?). BTW: If this turns out to be
easier than the guideline on the Wiki, it would be great if you could
write up a short HOWTO that could be posted on the wiki (or even replace
the current guide).

> Speaking of the Wiki, it might be worth noting in there that the Lua and
> Python plugins (if they are to be included) have to be compiled BEFORE
> compiling TW (at least on Windows).
>   

I'll try to remember that. In fact I've already written this somewhere,
but removed it again before updating the page. This needs a little more
testing first (e.g. which directives are really needed, how can one
compile Tw without plugins altogether, etc.).

Regards
Stefan