Why is it compiling GMP so hard?

[Paul Leyland]

On Wed, 2005-03-09 at 20:18, Fausto Arinos Barbuto wrote:
> Hi Torbjörn,
> 
>     Thanks for your reply. I hope you are not a Unix/Linux zealot --
>     there is fanatism enough in this world. ;-)  Having that said, I
>     must add that I am not exactly a Windows fan -- but I must
>     face the facts, W2000 is what I have on this desktop, thus I
>     either get along with this OS or I'm going nowhere.

I've been using GMP for some years now, and subscribing to the list for
quite a while too.  At the moment I barely use Windows at all, being
almost exclusively Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris based.  Nonetheless, I'm
with Fausto on this one.

Face it: installing a high-performance version of GMP on the Windows
platform is hard work and, IMO, much harder work than it needs to be. 
It is very Unix-centric (to forestall opposing claims, I am well aware
that it can be got to work on non-Unix systems) and if you don't have a
Unix box you have to go out of your way to make it look like Unix. 
Building stuff under Visual Studio is possible and the sterling work of
the likes of Brian Gladman has made the task somewhat easier but it is
still far from trivial.  I was extremely disappointed when, a few months
ago, someone offered to do most if not all of the work needed to make
GMP easier to install and use on a Windows box only to be told by
Torbjorn, in effect, that his offer was unwelcome.  I'll dig the email
exchange out of the archives if anyone doubts my claim.

Ok, whingeng over.  Let's see if I can do something more useful for
you.  I personally don't like CygWin, at least the "free" version
because of the onerous licensing conditions.  However, you should be
able to find the "m4" package somewhere on the Gygwin site.  Dig it out
and install it.  That should get you over your immediate hurdle.

Personally I greatly prefer Services for Unix, aka SFU 3.5.  This is a
free (as in beer) download from www.microsoft.com.  It gives you a
Unix-like interface on top of Windows, including Unix file system
semantics, and a whole bunch of Unix applications (most of which are
free as in speech and beer) including the gcc tool set and m4.  Note
that some of SFU is BSD licensed and some GPL / LGPL (thereby putting an
end to the claim that MS won't touch GPL/LGPL code under any
circumstances) and you may redistribute your software under any license
you wish as far as MS is concerned, though you may still be bound by the
GPL/LGPL if you make use of code so licensed.

The only downside of SFU that I've come across so far is that binaries
compiled under it will run only on machines with SFU installed.

I've built architecture-tuned binaries of GMP (as well as many other
packages) under SFU and everything went very smoothly.  If anyone wants
specific assistance with SFU send me personal email and I'll see what I
can do.


Paul