Re: IUP 2.4, Lua 5.1 and Windows

[Antonio Scuri <scuri@...>]

> I first tried the compilation using the VisualStudio project
> files, but there I noticed that the configuration only
> contained the "DEBUG" build of the libraries. Because I
> am considering using IUP "seriously" I wanted to have
> both DEBUG and RELEASE versions of the libraries.

  Yes, the project files are only there for debuging porposes.


> So I decided to look at the TecMake way of doing things.
> After installing TecMake I noticed that it wanted to
> generate dependency information using gcc (this was
> not required, but I wanted to make TecMake happy),
> so I added gcc to my cygwin distribution.

  You can set the USE_NODEPEND environment 
variable, and it will ignore the dependencies.


> When examining the TecMake config, I noticed that
> it supported compiling the debug/release versions into
> separate libraries, if I defined DBG and DBG_DIR variables
> (by set DBG=1 and set DBG_DIR=1 in command shell)
> before running tecmake.
> !!!!!!!!!!!
> Here I met a problem with TecMake setting the DBG_DIR changes
> the TEC_UNAME to for example vc71d, but latter 
> the tecmakewin.mak compares the TEC_UNAME only 
> to vc6 vc7 vc71 or vc8. I fixed this
> by adding comparisons also to vc71d etc.
> !!!!!!!!!!!!

  I do not use DBG_DIR for a long time now. 
That's probably because only the VC7 project 
files are used for debugging. I also do not think 
that DBG_DIR is a good solution in Tecmake. We 
have to improve that in the future.


> In order to compile I had to do some editing in im/src/make_uname.bat
> and comment out the im_wmv target, because I 
> didn't want to install the related SDKs at this 
> time. I also dropped compiling Lua5 (instead of 
> Lua5.1) versions of some of the components, because I did not need them.
> (But I suspect that I had to return some of them because something
> important was not built, if I dropped them)

  You did right. To comment the make_uname 
script is the best way to build only what you want.


> !!!!!!!!!!
> Next I experienced problems with bin2c generated 
> code it used the lua_dobuffer function, which doesn't exists in lua 5.1.
> I replaced it with luaL_loadbuffer and lua_pcall (and some assert
> calls, in order to make it easier to find out what went wrong....)
> I did this by editing the bin2c code.
> !!!!!!!!!!!

  The LuaBinaries distribution of Lua 5.1 
re-includes the bin2c to the distribution. But I 
just added the file without checking the 
compatibility (tsc tsc..). To build IUP I have to 
fix bin2c for Lua 5.1 just like you did it. I'm 
going to fix this for the 5.1 final release in LuaBinaries.


> During the process I met some problems which required quite a lot
> of time to track down. For example I suspect that at one point
> I was using Lua5 compiled (Lua) binaries with my Lua51 executable,
> this caused the Iuplua51 exe to exit mysteriously.

   When building the 2.4 binaries I had to 
rebuild sometimes because in some build I used 
the wrong Lua binaries. To build for two versions 
of Lua 5 was hard, but I had to make sure that 
IUP will work with 5.0 and 5.1. For the next 
version I hope to build only for 5.1 and simplify the make_uname scripts.

  IUP is not simple to build because it has many 
libraries and uses other libraries and depends a 
lot on native libraries like Motif. That´s also 
why we release many pre-compiled binaries. The 
Tecmake way is always the best choice to build it 
because of the make_uname scripts. It makes life 
a lot easier. Sorry about the mess with Lua 5.0 
and Lua 5.1, but if anyone has only Lua 5.0 then the build should be simpler.

  Thanks for the feedback.

Best,
scuri