Building glean on Windows

This document describes a process for building glean on Win32 systems. It assumes that you're using MSVC 6.0. This document is based off of the prior version of this document by Johan Smet.

Building glean is actually a pretty painless process once you know what to do. Step by step, the process is:

Get CVS
Get the glean source distribution
Get glext.h
Get STLPort 4.0. There's a pre-configured copy available from this webpage
Get the LibTIFF lib and header. Also available from this page
Configure the appropriate environment variables
Edit make/common.win to point to your copies of the STLPort and LibTIFF
Build it

Getting CVS

While you can download an older version of glean as a zipfile off SourceForge, this file describes the process for building a current version of glean from the SourceForge CVS tree. Therefore, you'll need CVS (1.10 or later, preferably) to get it. The easiest way I've found to get a Win32 binary of CVS is to download WinCVS and during installation, pick a Custom Install and only install the cvs command-line client (or, of course, you could install the full WinCVS if you want the full WinCVS).

Getting glean

Once you have CVS installed, you can get a copy of the latest source distribution of glean by doing the following:

Find the directory you want glean to live in. Note that the way it comes from the repository, if you wanted it to live in c:/glean, you don't need to make the glean subdirectory; just fetch it into c:/.

From the base directory (i.e. c:/ in the above example) type:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.glean.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/glean login 
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.glean.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/glean co glean

When prompted for a password during the "login" command, just hit Enter.

After executing the second command, you should see it pull down a bunch of files (which may take a few minutes), and you will subsequently have the glean source!

Getting glext.h

If you don't already have it, make sure to get an updated version of glext.h and put it in the same directory as your gl.h, which is usually under /include/gl in your MSVC install dir.

Glean doesn't currently build with the STL version that comes with MSVC. As such, you'll need a copy of the STLPort to build glean. I have, so far, only verified that it builds with STLPort 4.0. To make things easy, there's a pre-configured (and prebuilt) version of the STLPort 4.0 available right here. Following is the copyright and distribution notice from the STLPort:


Copyright (c) 1999,2000 Boris Fomitchev

This material is provided "as is", with absolutely no warranty 
expressed or implied. Any use is at your own risk. Permission 
to use or copy this software for any purpose is hereby granted 
without fee, provided the above notices are retained on all 
copies. Permission to modify the code and to distribute modified 
code is granted, provided the above notices are retained, and 
a notice that the code was modified is included with the above 
copyright notice.

This source contained here does contain a modification, simply that in stlport/stl/_site_config.h, I have uncommented the #defines for _NOTHREADS and __STL_NO_THREADS. This allows the STLPort to be used with non-multithreaded apps (like glean). The included libs are built off of this modified source.

Download the modified, prebuilt STLPort-4.0 for glean here (3.5 megs). Unzip it somewhere, being careful to preserve the internal directories of the zipfile.

Getting LibTIFF

LibTIFF is just one lib and a handful of headers. Download them here (113K), and unzip them to some directory.

Configuring Environment Variables

You must set the environment variable GLEAN_ROOT to point to base of your glean distribution. This should be the directory that has subdirectories /src, /doc, /bin, /include, /lib, /make, etc.

You also must run the vcvars32.bat that comes with MSVC, found in /bin/vcvars32.bat under your MSVC install.

You can set GLEAN_ROOT and run vcvars32.bat from your autoexec.bat, but I find it easier to do another way:

Make a batch file that sets GLEAN_ROOT and calls vcvars32.bat.
Make a New Shortcut on your desktop, to command.com. (This is basically a DOS-Prompt shortcut.)
Then, right-click the shortcut and go to Properties; a new tabbed panel opens.
Under the Memory tab, jack the Initial Environment size up to 4096.
Under the Program tab, set the Batch File to call your configuration batch file.

Then, in order to build glean, just run that DOS-Prompt shortcut and build it from within that shell.

Editing make/common.win

The three things you'll need to edit in make/common.win (in the glean source distribution) are STL_BASE_DIR, LIBTIFF_INC_DIR, and LIBTIFF_LIB_DIR.

STL_BASE_DIR should be the name of the base directory that the STLPort is in, such that /lib, /src, /doc, /stlport, etc. are subdirectories of STL_BASE_DIR.
LIBTIFF_INC_DIR should be the directory that the various LibTIFF headers (tiff.h, tiffio.h, etc) reside in.
LIBTIFF_LIB_DIR should be the directory that libtiff.lib resides in. If you just unzipped the libtiff zipfile into one directory, this will likely be the same as LIBTIFF_INC_DIR.

Build glean

Go to the /src directory under your glean directory. Hopefully, typing nmake /f makefile.win will build glean successfully! If there are problems, try to address them and then run a nmake /f makefile.win clean before rebuilding.