[Xapian-discuss] Building Xapian and Python Bindings for Windows: Solved

[Patrick Mézard]

Hello,
I have finally managed to build xapian-core 0.9.2 and xapian python 
bindings for Windows/Python 2.3. Here is a summary of what I did, maybe 
it could be helpful for someone else, who knows.

The following posts where especially useful:
- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.search.xapian.general/1645 : 
win32/find.exe vs unix/find
- http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.search.xapian.devel/600 : 
pythonXY.a generation and other SWIG tricks.

It is likely some problems I had came from previous tools setup quirks, 
but I cannot tell for sure. I will add '*' before issues I did not find 
anywhere else, maybe someone will know.

xapian-core
-----------
- Compilation platform is WinXP SP2 on IA-32 (Athlon something). I have 
MSVC 7.1 and other unrelated compilation tools already installed.

- Setup cygwin, mingw-4.1.0 and msys-1.0.10. Added all the bin/ 
subdirectories to PATH in this order, before system paths (to solve the 
find.exe mismatch problem)

- Retrieve and extract "xapian-core-0.9.2"

*- Update the root makefile to take in account the backend archive 
targets. It means creating a variable like:
"""
BACKENDS_LA =   backends/quartz/libquartz.la \
                 backends/flint/libflint.la \
                 backends/multi/libmulti.la \
                 backends/inmemory/libinmemory.la
"""
and adding it la_DEPENDENCIES and la_LIBADD actions in makefile.in.
It seems dependency resolution fails to work recursively with dependent 
archives, which happens with the backends: xapian-core <- libbackend <- 
[all backends archives]. So I resolved it manually. I suppose it would 
be better to edit the Makefile.am and let automake do everything but 
when I tried it, "make" seems to run forever so, being rather ignorant 
about the GNU toolchain I ended changing the .in instead. Without these, 
the build almost works but ends with missing references when trying to 
link the shared library.

- Open a prompt on xapian-core root directory, started a cygwin sh and 
run "./configure". Then run "make install". Cygwin /usr/local being not 
the same than the MSYS /usr/local, move all the stuff which was 
installed in the second to the first.


Python bindings
---------------
- Instruction below assumes python is setup in "d:/python23".
- Build the libpython23.a as explained in 
http://sebsauvage.net/python/mingw.html [2. Create libpython22.a]. 
Basically, find the python DLL and run:
"""
 > pexports python23.dll > pythonxy.def
 > dlltool --dllname python23.dll --def python23.def --output-lib 
libpython23.a
"""
and move the libpython23.a into Python lib/ directory.

*- Run configure for python bindings:
"""
 > ./configure XAPIAN_CONFIG=/usr/local/bin/xapian-config --without-php 
--without-tcl --without-java --without-guile --without-csharp
"""
Note: at this point configure outputs something like
"""
checking for python... /cygdrive/d/Python23//python
"""
Which seems wrong and will cause some problems later.

- Run make:
"""
 > make install PYTHON_LIBS='-Ld:/python23/libs -lpython23'
"""
Again, make almost works until:
"""
PYTHONPATH=".;.libs" /cygdrive/d/Python23//python -c "import xapian" 
/bin/sh: /cygdrive/d/Python23//python: No such file or directory
"""
The python path detected by configure is definitely wrong. Do not worry, 
it would not have worked with a good one since the installer also miss 
cygwin xapian DLL. Instead, install it manually: copy "xapian.py", 
"_xapian.dll" and "cygxapian-8.dll" in python package path, then try to 
import "xapian" in an interpreter, and run the "smoketest.py" test.
- Enjoy !


Finally, you can try a still in development higher level wrapper written 
by DivMod here: http://divmod.org/trac/wiki/DivmodXapwrap. Because it 
would be just too easy, it does not work out of the box for Windows, you 
will have to rewrite a custom version of FilesystemLock (using Win32 
named mutexes for example), otherwise it is okay. I will try to send 
them a patch about that.

--
Patrick Mézard