Re: My fixes (?) for building Abiword on MSYS/gcc

Steve D. Perkins wrote:
>
> Hey everybody -
>
> I started using Abiword a week or so ago, and have opened up a couple
> of Bugzilla items for issues I've found. Going through the Bugzilla
> repository it looks like there's already 2,000 or so outstanding items
> backlogged, so I thought I might just build from source myself and see
> if my issues are something I could fix myself to help out.
>
> I was able to build Abiword on my Windows 2000 workstation using GCC
> and the MSYS shell, although I did have to patch a few makefiles. This
> puzzled me, because I've read other reports in the mailing list archive
> that give me the impression that other people are building the source
> out-of-the-box using MSYS without needing to patch anything. I don't
> know if it could have anything to do with the fact that I use Mohan
> Embar's (http://www.thisiscool.com/gcc_mingw.htm) build of GCC 3.4 with
> Java compiler rather than the standard MinGW team's build. Still, the
> particular issues I saw didn't look like anything that this would cause.
>
> Here are the steps I had to do in order to build Abiword 2.3.4 from
> the tarball:
>
> 1) First of all, the master Makefile acts as if it wants to build
> "libpng" and "zlib" from the directories in the same base as "abi", but
> fails to do so. I think it's expecting to find "Makefile" in the
> "libpng" directory, but the makefile there is named "Makefile.abi"
> instead. I had to start the build process by running "make -f
> Makefile.abi" in the "libpng" directory, then run "make" in the "zlib"
> directory, and THEN run the make build from "abi".

The zlib peer directory is only used for VC++ builds. It seems to me
that you ran into trouble with zlib because you didn't have the zlib dll
in the correct place. From the build doc:

You will need the "zlib" library to build AbiWord. The zlib "compiled
DLL" version can be found at http://www.gzip.org/zlib/. Extract the
complete archive (i.e. headers, library files, and the compiled dll) to
a peer directory named 'libs\zlib\'.

If you get that dll, you won't need to do all that makefile patching to
get AbiWord to build :). Hope that helps.
Received on Mon Jul 25 21:56:25 2005