Re: [pcre-dev] Installing pcre-devel 7.8-1 on Windows XP

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Author: Sheri
Date:  
To: Carolyn Tozier
CC: pcre-dev
Subject: Re: [pcre-dev] Installing pcre-devel 7.8-1 on Windows XP
Carolyn Tozier wrote:
> Hello to everyone. I'm a newbie trying to install pcre-devel-7.8-1 on
> Windows XP with MinGW. Can you give me some installment instructions? Thank
> you,
> Carolyn
>
>
>

What is pcre-devel-7.8-1?

The most recent version of PCRE is 7.9. Prior to that was 7.8.
ftp://ftp.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/software/programming/pcre/

You need to first download and install CMake from http://www.cmake.org/
Also put cmake's bin directory on your path.

Instructions for building with CMake are in the text file NON-UNIX-USE.
However, that file says to run "CmakeSetup" for configuring PCRE, and
with recent versions of CMake, it is preferable to run "cmake-gui".

Unzip (retaining folder structure) PCRE into its own directory,
preferably one without spaces.

From your minGW environment, run cmake-gui. Browse to unzipdir\pcre-7.9
as Source dir, and enter a build path (also preferably one without spaces).

Click Configure, and choose minGW as generator. Select all your pcre
options, then Generate. Keep in mind that with the default options, PCRE
uses stack for recursion. Unless each of your programs that is going to
use PCRE is going to allocate sufficient stack, you should choose the
option PCRE_NO_RECURSE. Otherwise, even the test programs that come with
PCRE will not work cleanly because they require 8 mb of stack, and by
default Windows only allocates 1 mb. You might also want to consider
using ANYCRLF as the default PCRE_NEWLINE and enabling
PCRE_SUPPORT_BSR_ANYCRLF. For my purposes, those options work well on
Windows. You should review all the options in the documentation.

After the make files have been generated, cmake-gui will close. Switch
into your build directory and run mingw's make.

Afterwards, be sure to run the tests. See the instructions in
NON-UNIX-USE for testing with RunTest.bat.

I build PCRE shared libraries on Windows XP in Msys (which also uses
minGW, but CMake has a separate option for generating Msys vs minGW
makefiles).

Regards,
Sheri