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I'd like to second Jesse's comments. Autotools and Visual Studio projects are pretty wretched even on a good day and there are solutions out there that provide cross-platform support in one build system. Jesse has a CMake build of IPOPT and I've have one that uses SCons that builds MUMPS and the PyIPOPT wrapper as well. A lot of the COIN-OR software is interdependent and it needs a consistent build system. It's fair enough that COIN-OR is Linux-oriented and uses Autotools, we get a lot of high-quality software for free. I don't consider Cygwin or MSYS to be serious for Windows platforms (dons asbestos shirt...) for the same reasons as Jesse; they don't play nicely with the industrial-strength dev platforms for that operating system.<br><br>If we were to volunteer to support people with our alternatives, are they something that could be distributed with IPOPT, or should we just post our build systems to this list and/or host them on our own websites?<br><br>Damien<br><blockquote style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(0, 0, 255); padding-left: 5px; margin-left: 5px; margin-right: 0px;"><hr><b>From:</b> Jesse Perla [mailto:jesseperla@gmail.com]<br><b>To:</b> COIN-IPOPT Mailing List [mailto:ipopt@list.coin-or.org]<br><b>Cc:</b> Andreas Waechter [mailto:andreasw@watson.ibm.com]<br><b>Sent:</b> Fri, 06 Mar 2009 09:07:26 -0700<br><b>Subject:</b> Re: [Ipopt] Binaries for Windows<br><br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="im">> We have no intention to change the build system. What we have now is<br>
> based on autotools and has been working pretty well on most platforms,<br>
> including Windows via Cygwin or MSys. The Ipopt configure and build<br>
> system is also aligned with the rest of COIN; making any change here<br>
> has mayor painful consequences ;-)<br></div>I second that -- I use Mingw/MSYS on Windows and consider support for<br>
that platform as well as MinGW GCC to be a 'must-have' in IPOPT.<br></blockquote></div><br><div>Sorry everyone, I didn't mean to audaciously suggest that everything should move to CMake and that Mingw/MSYS shouldn't be supported. All I meant was that it was very easy to port to CMake and that you get everything for free after that. And since IPOPT is distributing a set of "Visual Studio" projects, and what I meant to suggest was that CMake was a good alternative to this Visual Studio distribution. It is easily decouple library dependencies, easier to write/maintain, and you get a build on any other platform for free. Anytime I have mentioned variations on windows binaries for debug, etc., the answer has been that it is a pain in the ass. Which it is... but with CMake, it would be a few simple batch file to generate every permutation of windows binaries.</div>
<div><br></div><div>With that said, I think people in the linux world tend to overestimate the value of mingw/msys for libraries. It is certainly necessary, but the binary incompatibility with Intel/MSVC makes it almost useless for a lot of applications with libraries. Cygwin/msys builds tend to force you to recompile everything on your own which makes concurrent integration with other libraries than IPOPT tough. I received a number of personal emails after my last post, so believe me when I say there is a lot of demand for native windows.</div>
<div><br></div><div>I am over-committed on work right now, but I will post up CMake files and notes as soon as I get a chance. In the meantime, contact me at will: <a href="mailto:jesse.perla@nyu.edu">jesse.perla@nyu.edu</a> and if anyone is interested in using MUMPS, they could try out: <a href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/winmumps/">http://sourceforge.net/projects/winmumps/</a></div>
<div><br></div><div>May we one day be free from the shackles of autohell and those godawful visual studio project files.</div><div>-Jesse</div>
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