Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] MSVC porting

[Eric Blossom]

On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 12:24:06PM +0900, Geof Nieboer wrote:
> All,
> 
> After doing some 'proof of concept' with the VOR receiver (the phase
> comparator still isn't perfect, but bad weather has given me a marginal
> signal recently, so it's on hold for a tad), I've been really impressed with
> gnuradio.  It's only flaw it seems to me is that it's difficult for joe
> average to install/use on their PC.  So here's how I'd like to contribute:

Great!  Thanks for the update on your VOR receiver.  I was thinking
about it the other day.  Can you post the link to your code?  I may
have missed it.

> 
> 1-       Tweak the C++ libraries so that they'll compile under windows
> natively (MSVC++ 2005 specifically)
> 
> 2-       Add 'shims' to allow access to the C++ classes through .NET managed
> code on windows
> 
> 3-       Convert select python applications to C#
> 
> 4-       Build a standalone install package (easy once 1/2/3 are done)
>  
> I believe I've got a concept that will extend the functionality to a native
> windows environment without complicating the linux build process.  On my dev
> machine, I've set up a gnuradio source tree (3.1.2), and added a directory
> 'gnuradio.net'.  The .vsproj files etc go there, as well as any managed code
> (both Managed C++ and C# depending).

Geof, the concern I have with this approach is that there will
be two build systems in parallel, and one of them will be out of date
with respect to the other 99.99999% of the time.

I think an approach that could work would be to create a modified
version of automake that reads the Makefile.am's and produces a
project file instead of Makefile.in's.  automake is a perl script, so
all the parsing, logic, etc is already handled for you.  You can
probably dodge around configure.ac, by hardcoding some answers
that are reasonable for the windows environment.

Information on automake and links to the source can be found here:

  http://www.gnu.org/software/automake

Eric