Building Exodus on Windows with netCDF fails

[LeeJP1983]

Hello,

I am not sure if there is something I am missing, but I am trying to build Exodus on Windows. I am using x64 Native Tools Command Prompt for VS 2019 and CMake fails due to an execute_command(sh -c ...) call. (Hence my problem, as the Windows Command Prompt can't use sh.)

We're trying to do the CMake build and Visual Studio build in a single step and the tribits/common_tpl/FindNetCDF.cmake:276 fails because we can't run nc_config on Windows. Do you have any advice for how we might be able to do this? We had no issues doing this on Linux.

Thanks, Jerimiah

[gsjaardema]

I am definitely not a windows programmer so have very little to offer as advise. The SEACAS system including Exodus is built on every commit on AppVeyor using the commands in the .appveyor.yml file. I would suggest looking at the cmake configuration used in that file and see if that helps.

If you do get a good build, please let me know how to improve the documentation.

[LeeJP1983]

Thanks for the response Greg,

I'm using that to guide us.

Can you confirm if pthreads is supported for Windows?

-Jerimiah

[gsjaardema]

I can neither confirm nor deny... Sorry, we don't typically run on Windows and only verify that the library will build and run some tests.

[LeeJP1983]

Thanks Greg,

I'll keep at it for now. I was able to get a static library built, but the cmake install is creating a symlink to a .a file instead of the .lib file I would expect.

[LeeJP1983]

Here are a few notes of what I've had to do to build on Windows, without using MinGW:

CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE, the value for this variable, must be all caps, otherwise it will only build release. This is because TribitsGlobalMacros.cmake does a STREQUAL comparison. I would recommend that this be modified to do a case insensitive regex MATCHES.

In regards to pthreads, we can build with the following cmake variables: '-DCMAKE_C_FLAGS=-DHAVE_STRUCT_TIMESPEC -ID:/3rdpartylibs/pthreads/2.9.1/build/win64/include', '-DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS=-DHAVE_STRUCT_TIMESPEC -ID:/3rdpartylibs/pthreads/2.9.1/build/win64/include'

The other issue is the use of the netCDF nc_config script. Instead of relying on the nc_config script to determine what dependencies are needed, I had to add all of the dependencies manually. That is, instead of setting NetCDF_ROOT, I instead had to set Netcdf_LIBRARY_DIRS, Netcdf_INCLUDE_DIRS and TPL_Netcdf_LIBRARIES. However we had to add slightly more than just netCDF and HDF5, as our HDF5 static library depends on szip and zlib, those libraries also had to be added in.

Thanks for the guidance.

[gsjaardema]

I've discussed the CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE issue with the TriBITs developer (a wrapper around CMake used by SEACAS and Trilinos). His discussion is in https://github.com/TriBITSPub/TriBITS/issues/131

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