I just released a new version of Calc Solver after more than a year since the last release. A lot of effort has gone into this release mostly to re-package it as a true UNO extension, and also to make it available for the Windows version of OO.o beginning with this release.
The UI has been localized for French and Japanese, thanks to Laurent Godard and Kazunari Hirano. Laurent also helped me on various UNO related issues, so I would really like to acknowledge his help. Thank you Laurent. :-) The system language should be automatically picked up and the appropriate translation texts should be displayed for English, French and Japanese. If this doesn’t work for you, please let me know.
The ride was quite bumpy, however, to get Solver to build on Windows. Since this was my first attempt to build anything non-trivial on Windows, I had to spend a few days (and nights) studying how the MSVC compiler works so that I could build a DLL. There was also an issue with multi-thread vs single-thread libraries, so I had to manually select the default libraries to be all single-threaded for the Solver as well as the lpsolve code. Not to mention I didn’t know how to set up a build environment since GNU make in cygwin didn’t work too reliably due to file path separator and the driver letter issues. In the end, I came up with a custom DOS batch script with everything hardcoded to semi-automate the build process, but that’s far from being elegant. I’m just wondering if there is any better way to set up a build environment on Windows… Question: what do Windows developers use these days to build C++ projects?
On the Linux side, the Solver extension installed and worked fine, but I’ve experienced a major problem with installing it in the Extension Manager UI. But as long as it’s installed from the command line using unopkg, it works fine. I still haven’t figured out why installing with the Extension Manager caused a problem but installing with unopkg didn’t.
Oh I almost forgot. If you use Go-oo version of OO.o (aka ooo-build) or any variant of it with my Solver already included, you don’t need to install this extension. It’s already there in Tools – Solver.
Anyway, enough talk. Enjoy! :-) And please report me any problems you may experience.
> what do Windows developers use these days to build C++ projects?
The great unwashed masses of course use Microsoft Visual Studio, full frontal GUI everything, have never used anything else. and are happy with that…
People from a more Unixish background, porting software originating from Unix that use some GNUish autoconfused buld system, often use the same also on Windows. I.e. autoconf, automake, libtool etc. If you want to go this way, stay away from Cygwin. It will only cause confusion, as you have noticed.
(OOo is built on Windows using Cygwin, sure, but they have to use lots of tricks to work around pitfalls.)
Cygwin is more or less a separate operating system just running on top of Windows.
Instead of Cygwin, use MSYS. It is technically a fork of Cygwin, but with some crucial changes, and a different raison d’être. MSYS (together with “mingw”, which is gcc and GNU binutils targeted for Win32) is intended just to be a development environment for native Win32 software, while Cygwin comes with a development environment for Cygwin software, so if you actually want to build non-Cygwin (“native Win32”) software on Cygwin, you have to be very careful, not to mix up things.
MSYS, when starting a non-MSYS programs, translates command-line arguments that look like file names in the Unix format into the corresponding native format with drive letters. It also translates PATH-style environment variables when starting non-MSYS programs. This means that you don’t have to worry about not passing “Cygwin” (Unixish) pathnames to native programs, like you have to when using Cygwin.
Hope this helps…
Great answer! Thanks a lot, Tor. :-)
Looks like MSYS will be a very attractive option. OTOH, I don’t mind so much on relying on Visual Studio’s build system, as long as I can invoke it from the command line & I can check in the build script. I just want to use whatever system is “native” to the target platform.
lpsolve is the best )
Hi,
I´m installed SCSolver in OO 2.4 (Portuguese Brazil), and the system language should not be automatically picked up and the appropriate translation texts. Appear Russian Language.
What´s happening?
Thanks a lot, sorry my English.
Clóvis Tristão
I’ve received similar problem from a Spanish user. It’s supposed to fall back to English (not Russian) if the translation is not available for the current locale. I’ll look into it.