[MINC-development] Windoze

[Robert VINCENT]

Hi all,

I entertained myself this weekend by building NetCDF 3.5 and MINC 1.1 on
Windows ME (I lead an exciting life, huh?).  I have no idea if this was
actually a useful exercise.  Can I get a show of hands? How many folks out
there could use MINC on Windows if it were generally available?  And what
other pieces besides the core distribution would have to be ported for the
whole package to be truly useful?

I created Makefiles for both GNU make (from Cygwin) and Microsoft NMAKE.
I just used Microsoft's compiler; it handles 99.9% of the code just fine -
I had to add a few #ifdefs here and there, perhaps changing 10 or 20 lines
of code.  I tried several of the NetCDF and MINC tests and everything
checked out fine, although there is a minor but annoying inconsistency in
floating-point output from printf().

There are several large questions to be answered yet, though - for
example, how to handle shell and perl scripts.  Obviously there are
solutions; I'm curious if anyone knows of an especially good perl
implementation for Win32.

If anyone is interested, I have a binary ZIP file I can make available for
evaluation & testing purposes.  Otherwise I'll just find other ways to
entertain myself next weekend...

	-bert