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

[Curt, WE7U]

On Fri, 10 Nov 2006, Tom Russo wrote:

> 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?

I read your arguments regarding the other libraries, and that's fine
by me.  I have no strong feelings one way or the other, just want to
get all the options out there on the table and see what people
think.

The reason to always build in Shapelib support is twofold:

*) Weather alert capability by default.  This assumes the user
   downloads the NOAA shapefiles via a simple script, which could be
   automated on install as well.

*) Minimum useful map capability by default.

In my opinion Shapefile support is the minimum map support
necessary, even if we ignore the weather alert stuff.  Other people
may suggest that online map capability is the desired minimum
instead.  There's no way that we'd want to include ImageMagick
support though, and I wouldn't even dream of suggesting that...
We've had more trouble with that one library over the past few years
than all the other libraries put together.  It would be untenable.

I propose that we include Shapelib in some fashion or other, whether
it is just the pieces we need or the entire Shapelib CVS.  Whether
it gets installed statically or dynamically is not a big concern of
mine.  I can see arguments for doing it via several different
methods and any of them would appear to work if implemented
correctly.

Doing it the way you suggested, where we have a private library that
gets compiled/installed in the case where no installed copy is found
by configure, sounds like a reasonable way to do it, and would
probably require the fewest changes to our configure.ac/aclocal.m4
files.  Whether to include the entire Shapelib distribution in a
subtree or to include a subset depends on how much we want to
maintain it.  If we include only a subset then I think we need to do
more editing of each file to change the license from LGPL to GPL and
such, at least according to what I read.  If we include the whole
thing, then we just need to periodically refresh all the files, and
we can leave them as-is.  I think including the whole thing would be
the easiest in the long run.  It's not that big anyway.

--
Curt, WE7U.   APRS Client Comparisons: http://www.eskimo.com/~archer
"Lotto:    A tax on people who are bad at math." -- unknown
"Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates." -- WE7U
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