readme.ms-mingw

Welcome to MS4W, the no fuss installer for setting up MapServer on Microsoft Windows platforms. The

Mapserver and Mapscript/Tcl for Windows

These are the steps I have made to compile Mapserver and Mapscript/Tcl for
Windows.  My build environment is the Mingw (Minimalist GNU for Windows)
compiler and toolchain, hosted on Linux/Unix.  

You probably want to use the pre-compiled DLL, if at all possible.
Things get ugly after this......



First, make a new directory to hold everthing we will need.

	mkdir ms_win
	cd ms_win

Unpack the ms-mingw.tar.gz in that directory:

	gunzip -c ../ms-mingw.tar.gz | tar xf -


Next, you'll need the Mingw compiler and toolchain, compiled as a 
cross compiler, hosted on your Linux or Unix platform.

Mo DeJong has written a shell script to download, compile, and install *all*
of the compiler, toolchain, and Mingw libraries.  The script is in
ms-mingw/mingw-xcc.sh  I have set the script to install the tools into
/opt/mingw.  If you want to change this, you'll need to also change the 'build'
shell script.  The mingw-xcc.sh script uses the 'wget' program to fetch
files via ftp (ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/wget/).

	cd ms-mingw
	sh mingw-xcc.sh
	cd ..


Next, get *fresh* sources of all of the required MapServer packages, and 
unpack in the ms_win directory.  Your 'ms_win' directory should look 
like this after unpacking all of the sources:

	README.ms-mingw  install     ms-mingw/    tcl8.3.2/
	build            jpeg-6b/    proj-4.4.2/  tiff-v3.5.5/
	freetype-1.3.1/  mapserver/  regex-0.12/  zlib-1.1.3/


The 'ms-mingw' directory contains directories for each of the components we
will be building.  Each directory consists of a Makefile for Mingw as a 
cross compiler, and a 'build' script to copy the Makefile into the source
directories (as above), and make the libraries.

Software locations:

mingw:	http://www.mingw.org
	The mingw-xcc.sh script will grab things for you.
	There's a lot of info on the Mingw compiler and its use as a 
	cross compiler at the site.

proj:	http://www.remotesensing.org/proj/
	Get version 4.4.2

zlib:   http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/zlib/
	Get version 1.1.3

jpeg:   ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/
	Get version 6b.

tiff:   http://www.libtiff.org/
	Get version 3.5.5

freetype: http://www.freetype.org
	Get version 1.3.1
	NOTE!!!  I have found the the freetype-1.3.1.tar.gz file contains
	source files with dos style end of line characters (cr-lf).  This 
	will likely confuse gcc.  The easy way to convert into normal
	unix-style text files is to get the freetype-1.3.1.zip, and
	use 'unzip -a freetype-1.3.1' to unpack it, converting the
	files to use lf only.  Rename the 'freetype' directory to 
	'freetype-1.3.1'.

regex: ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/regex/regex-0.12.tar.gz
	  
mapserver: http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/dload.html
	Get the 'nightly' CVS builds for 3.4 (beta), nightly.tar.gz. 
	We will also use the GD 1.2 and GDFT libraries that come with 
	Mapserver.  As a side effect, we will also build an executable,
	mapserv.exe.

tcl:	http://dev.scriptics.com
	Get version 8.3.2
	We will only be building 'libtclstub83.a', not the entire 
	Tcl library.  Also get 'tcl832.exe' and install it on your Windows
	machine(s) if you don't already have it.  For best results,
	let the installer place Tcl in 'C:\Program Files\Tcl'.




Build everything:
Use the build script in this directory.  (change the values of 'mingwbin' and
'mingwxcc' if needed.)

	sh build

Install:
You probably have to be root to write into /c.

	sh install

Or, you can ftp the files over to your windows box and use the 'setup.tcl' 
installer.


Notes:  

Building for Windows is a royal pain in the ***!  The biggest problem is
building the various libraries the 'right' way, i.e, as DLL files.  This
requires a majic Windows macro to export the symbols for the DLL, but another
majic macro for code that uses the symbols in a DLL.  For software originally
not designed to be portable across Unix and Windows, this requires changing
alot of source files.  

    Examples of software that is written for portability: zlib, tcl
    Examples of software that is not: proj, mapserver

The alternative:  compile the source library code, and bundling it into
a standard library file, e.g., libz.a, libjpeg.a, libttf.a, etc.
We then take all of the libraries and create our final DLL, libMapscript.dll.
The downside is that we're not allowing any reuse of the libaries, but the
upside is we don't have to change much exisiting code.  I do this method.