can't compile on ubuntu 10.4 64bits

[Olly Betts]

On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 01:29:31PM -0300, Carlos Grohmann wrote:
> Hello. I just have a new machine with ubuntu 10.4 (lucid), 64 bits. I
> tried to compile Survex, but I couldn't.
> There is no non-unicode wxwidgets for this release (only for 9.04 from
> one year ago).

Well, your current options are to:

* Build your own wxwidgets
* Use Survex from SVN (branches/survex-1_1)
* Wait for me to resolve a bug I'm working on and make a new release

> Also, considering that the new 2.9 release of Wx won't make any
> discrimination between unicode and ansi, may I suggest it is time for
> a unicode-friendly survex??

Survex has been Unicode-friendly for many years.

The wx nomenclature is rather inaccurate really - you can use Unicode via
UTF-8 with an "ANSI" build, whereas their "unicode" build is actually
*wide-character* Unicode.  Since Survex uses UTF-8 internally and so does
GTK+/Gnome, it's rather inefficient to translate everything to
wide-character Unicode for wx only for wx to then translate it straight back
again to pass to GTK+/Gnome.

Now wx 3.0 (which 2.9 is the development version of) was supposed to resolve
that by using UTF-8 internally in the GTK+ version:

http://wiki.wxwidgets.org/Development:_UTF-8_Support

So I'd been hoping to just move to that once it was out rather than have to
update everything twice.  But wx 3.0 is now years overdue - e.g. here they hope
to release in early 2008:

http://wxwidgets.blogspot.com/2007/11/looking-forward-to-wxwidgets-3.html

Understandably Linux distros don't like to have to support two versions of a
fairly complex library like wx, which has left Survex in an increasingly
inconvenient place.

I've finally given up waiting for wx 3.0, and have been integrating and
finishing off some patches Phil Underwood did for wide-character Unicode
support, so the SVN version now works with the packaged versions of
wxWidgets.

It all seems to be working now, but I'm just trying to nail down why crosses
plot as squares when using GL_POINT_SPRITE on my laptop (which seems to be
unrelated to Unicode, but it would be good to fix).

> The official repositories still have only survex 1.0.39, but 1.1.12 is
> available for a while...

1.0.39 is still the current stable release.

1.1.12 is a development version.  If it wasn't for this whole wx Unicode
saga, it would probably be the stable version now, but the changes for
wide-character Unicode touch a lot of the code so I'd like to make at least
one more development release to try to shake out any bugs that might
introduce.

Cheers,
    Olly