[Gretl-devel] more on building gretl on Windows

A bit more in response to https://www.mail-archive.com/gretl-devel@gretlml.univpm.it/msg10143.html and following. Also in response to useful information from Juan Estévez offlist. * The new gretl-specific package containing a suitable build of gnuplot for Windows was, as Juan pointed out, installing into the wrong location -- an extra "bin" directory under the one that should be used. That's now fixed. A pacman update under MSYS2: pacman -Syu should put that to rights. * The recently updated "deps" package contained a build of libgsf, but as Sven pointed out that wasn't working. I now see what the problem was: the libgsf DLL I included was cross-compiled on Linux and had somewhat different dependencies from those available on current MSYS2. So I've now removed libgsf from my deps package. If you installed the broken version you should update with "pacman -Syu" as above. If you want to have gretl use libgsf for zipping and unzipping (recommended) then you can install libgsf as packaged for mingw64: pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-libgsf * Build "errors" with messages of the form "Could not determine path..." are benign and can be ignored. * Build errors showing "error while loading shared libraries: ?": The "?" indicates that while something went wrong MSYS2 can't tell us what it was, which can be kinda frustrating. In my experience building on Windows (also Sven's) this is sometimes just temporary flakiness: run "make" again and it may work. But, Juan, if you were using my deps package including libgsf it's not just flakiness, it's a real problem with my libgsf DLL, as mentioned above. GTK3-specific: I've done a GTK3 build of gretl myself now. I'm working on trying to figure the minimal set of icons needed for a redistributable package. It's certainly nothing like the 45 MB under mingw64/share/icons (more like a few hundred KB, I think), but I'm not ready with a recipe yet. Allin