[bt-devel] Windows Build status

[Greg Hellings]

So the Windows building was, not surprisingly yet disappointingly, not
nearly as smooth as the Mac build.  I have built Qt 4.4.3 for both
Visual Studio and MinGW tool chains.  Likewise I have built CLucene
for both tool chains.  SWORD also builds on both systems once you
either put together a basic MinGW/MSYS system (I used some of the
directions from the wiki on how to build Xiphos on Windows, but I took
great liberties and really only went so far as to install the
libraries that he suggested - I did install the Technology Preview
versions and they seem to work just great).  I am sure I could build
ICU under Visual Studio as well, since that is an officially supported
system for them (and there are also .dll files that someone else in
the SWORD project world has either acquired or built themselves that
could be used).  Using CMake I was able to configure BibleTime for use
with Visual Studio 2008, since I find that programs built with the
native compiler tend to be much better at their jobs than those built
with a compiler that's been shoe-horned into the system.  The
following errors manifest themselves:

strcasecmp - the case agnostic string comparison function is called
stricmp on Windows.  Change the name and it works marvelously
(probably a simple #define macro could work perfectly, even in
config.h.cmake).
pthread.h - no such file in Visual Studio 2008, although there is an
open source implementation of pthread-win32, its latest release is
2006 and I haven't tried to build it in Visual Studio.  Qt3 had the
option of no threading - so it made sense to use pthread back then,
when there may not have been support in Qt.  However, according to
Trolltech's Qt4 Thread page, it is always enabled in Qt4, so it might
be a smart idea to move to using Qt-only for threads.  pthread.h does
exist for MSYS/MinGW, though, so that is a possibility.
dirent.h - there is also no such file in Visual Studio, though there
is in MinGW.  Just glancing through the Qt4 documentations, use of the
QDir object would allow the same functionality that is being used in
CSwordBackend::moduleConfig.  As in the case of pthread, it's probably
desirable to move to using all native Qt functions rather than
non-Standard  system headers like dirent.h.  But I don't think that I
quite grasp the exact functionality at this hour, so I will refrain
from trying to submit a patch for that.
BT_VERSION - this is normally defined in config.h, but it doesn't
appear to have been in the version of config.h which was included to
its references in the source in main.cpp, migrationutil.cpp and
bibletime.cpp.  I manually moved the bibletime-svn/src and
bibletime-build/ include lines to the top of Visual Studio's include
lists for the include search, and this error went away.  I presume VS
was pulling in a config.h from Qt or something like that.

Other, miscellaneous errors which only seem to appear in Visual Studio
in only two places:
2>..\bibletime-svn\src\frontend\settingsdialogs\clanguagesettings.cpp(98)
: error C3083: '{ctor}': the symbol to the left of a '::' must be a
type

2>..\bibletime-svn\src\frontend\cinfodisplay.cpp(239) : error C2040:
'i' : 'Rendering::CTextRendering::KeyTreeItem *' differs in levels of
indirection from 'int'
2>..\bibletime-svn\src\frontend\cinfodisplay.cpp(246) : error C2440:
'=' : cannot convert from 'Rendering::CTextRendering::KeyTreeItem *'
to 'int'
2>        There is no context in which this conversion is possible
2>..\bibletime-svn\src\frontend\cinfodisplay.cpp(254) : error C2440:
'=' : cannot convert from 'Rendering::CTextRendering::KeyTreeItem *'
to 'int'
2>        There is no context in which this conversion is possible

So, while I have a built and ready-to-go version of Bibletime on my
Mac that I was happily using today, Bibletime on Windows is slightly
further out, though not insurmountably so.  The goal is within
eyesight!

--Greg