[Xastir] Better and/or Easier Way to Get Xastir on Windows

[Tom Russo]

On Fri, Nov 10, 2006 at 08:27:35AM -0800, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <archer at eskimo.com> flavor, containing:
> While we're on the subject, could this be extended to any of the
> myriad other libraries that we use?  

Yes.  But I would think it would be highly undesirable to do so.

> If we intend to have Shapelib
> always be present (a really great idea), it would at least be nice
> to have all of the Shapefile-related options turned on too (Berkeley
> DB/PCRE/rtree).

I would probably be very afraid of starting to include too much.  It would
be very, very easy to get carried away.

Shapelib is a tiny library, and we have explicit permission to include its
source in xastir's.  It is also very stable.  Since we're using a fairly
small fraction of shapelib's capabilities, it might not even be necessary to
include all the sources (the contrib directory, for example).

DB is neither small nor stable, what with its 3MB source tarball. 

PCRE isn't particularly tiny, either.

Statically linking all those libraries would bloat the executable.  And if 
we bundle all this stuff so that xastir can be built with all features 
enabled by folks who haven't gone through the trouble of installing other
packages, then a fair number of casual users will wind up with the most bloated
version.

> If we could get libtiff/libproj/libgeotiff, AX.25, libcurl,
> GDAL/OGR, GPSMan/gpsmanshp support in there too, so much the better.

Good lord.  Page for Ms. Pandora.

Now I'm starting to think that it is a bad idea to do even shapelib.

Keeping separate projects separate has value.  Bundling the kitchen sink in
just so that users don't need to bother with package management systems 
borders on the absurd.  And increases the maintenance headache of xastir.

If we need to bundle shapelib for some reason (and what was that again?), then
we should stop there.

It might be better to stop before there.  We already have a small number of
required libraries -- X11 and Motif --- should we argue that we need to 
bundle *those* too?.  If it's considered essential to have shapefile support,
why not just bump shapelib's status up to that level and leave it at that?  

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
"And, isn't sanity really just a one-trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is
 one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, oooh, oooh,
 oooh, the sky is the limit!"  --- The Tick