[Gretl-devel] building gretl on Windows, revisited

Thanks go to Sven for persevering in testing the Windows build process; as a result we've fixed several little glitches lately. So I'd encourage anyone else who's interested to have a go. Documentation is at http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/pub/gretl/winbuild/ Besides fixing glitches, however, there's now a substantial improvement in the process (in the last couple of days). The dependencies of a gretl build are mostly met by standard mingw64 packages but there are some additional materials required, which to date have been supplied by "static" archives: now those materials take the form of pacman packages subject to auto-updating. I've set up a package server at sourceforge which will be updated in sync with our package-builds for Windows. Here's the basic idea: when you're using pacman (in this case under MSYS2) the command pacman -Syu will update your cache of the relevant repository data and offer you any available package updates. This will now apply to the gretl-specific "extras" as well as the regular mingw64 stuff. If you run our latest setup.sh shell script from scratch you will automatically be tuned into this update path. If you already used the previous mechanism to initiate a gretl build you'll have to do a couple of things to get onto the auto-update path: 1) Make pacman aware of the new gretl package repository. There's a little shell script, add-repo.sh, in the "winbuild" directory referenced above, that will do that for you. 2) Remove the older "static" gretl-specific stuff (which will conflict with the new packages), then install the current packages. For the extra dependency libraries and headers: pacman -R mingw-gretl # remove pacman -S gretl-x86_64-deps # or gretl-i686-deps for 32-bit And for the gnuplot-for-gretl package: rm /opt/gretl/bin/wgnuplot.* pacman -S gretl-x86_64-gnuplot # or gretl-i686-gnuplot, 32-bit But note that the second of these updates will work only if you follow the recommendation to install gretl under /opt/gretl. Otherwise you're on your own. To be clear: the upside of making these changes is that, in future, running pacman -Syu will get you any updates to the gretl-specific builds of openblas, libcurl, libsvm and gnuplot, as they become available. Allin