Xapian discuss - Sep 2017 - how to build Xapian project on windows?

> It's close to irrelevant when they last worked at this point - the
current
> stable release series is 1.4.x, and they definitely won't work with
that.
acknowledged

Visual Studio 2008, win32 makefiles (from C. Hull's website)
and xapian-core-1.2.8 are mentioned together on this webpage

https://lists.xapian.org/pipermail/xapian-devel/2012-October/001883.html

On 04/09/2017 01:18, Eric Lindblad wrote:
>> It's close to irrelevant when they last worked at this point - the
current
>> stable release series is 1.4.x, and they definitely won't work with
that.
> 
> acknowledged
> 
> Visual Studio 2008, win32 makefiles (from C. Hull's website)
> and xapian-core-1.2.8 are mentioned together on this webpage
> 
> https://lists.xapian.org/pipermail/xapian-devel/2012-October/001883.html
> 
> 
> ---
> This email has been checked for viruses by AVG.
> http://www.avg.com
> 
> 
Chipping in after rather a long time away....I would advise that 
updating the nmake files will be a long and painful process if it works 
at all. The nmake method was always a hack, required lots of 
hoop-jumping to work around both Windows nmake and Visual C++ compiler 
idiosyncracies.

If it's possible to compile Xapian for Windows using another method, do 
that.

Charlie

On Mon, Sep 04, 2017 at 09:50:50AM +0100, Charlie Hull
wrote:
> Chipping in after rather a long time away....I would advise that updating
> the nmake files will be a long and painful process if it works at all. The
> nmake method was always a hack, required lots of hoop-jumping to work
around
> both Windows nmake and Visual C++ compiler idiosyncracies.
I've since dropped the nmake files from the git repo.
> If it's possible to compile Xapian for Windows using another method, do
> that.
With current git master, xapian-core can be successfully built and its
tests all pass for:

* mingw
* mingw64
* cygwin
* MSVS 2015
* MSVS 2017

Older MSVS versions likely lack the level of C++11 support we need.

I have set up CI on appveyor to help ensure these stay working:

https://ci.appveyor.com/project/ojwb/xapian

I'd encourage those interested to help extend this to cover omega,
the bindings and xapian-letor.  That's mostly a matter of figuring out
how to install the required dependencies for each platform, updating
".appveyor.yml" in the top level of the git tree, fixing any problems
this uncovers, and then submitting a patch.  If you do that as a github
PR then it ought to automatically get CI tested by appveyor.

It would also be useful to extend this to do 64-bit builds as well.
You'll probably need to disable the remote backend for that as currently
that assumes sizeof(HANDLE) <= sizeof(int).

If you're wanting to build with MSVC by hand, see ".appveyor.yml"
for
the commands needed:

https://git.xapian.org/?p=xapian;a=blob;f=.appveyor.yml;h=8d5de56832084411dd8e1d9fd7c51296ce0d1e8d;hb=HEAD

tl;dr, install MSYS2 and then something like this should work to build
xapian-core from a release tarball (once the changes to get this
building appear in a release):

./configure CC="cl -nologo" CXX="compile cl -nologo"
CXXFLAGS="-EHsc" AR=lib
make

Cheers,
    Olly