Re: Report on the Experimental PARI/GP 2.6 Windows installer binary

[Bill Allombert <Bill.Allombert@math.u-bordeaux1.fr>]

On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 11:39:55PM -0400, jacques G wrote:
> 
> 0. A REQUEST
> In a pari-dev message dated from 2 Oct 2001, "Experimental PARI/GP Windows
> installer binary", Bill Allombert announced a Windows port of GP/PARI 2.6
> <http://pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr/~bill/mingw/PARI-2-6.exe> (Thanks!!) and
> added "All this is mostly tested under wine, so please report success,
> failure and problems with real Windows systems." Since this reply is user
> oriented and does not contain definitive solutions to known problems, it is
> sent to pari-users, and Unix users should just ignore it.

First, apology for the late answer. Be assured that your email was much appreciated,
but I lost much motivation to work on the mingw port due to a quite painful bug.

> 1. AN INSTALLATION
> Let me first of all report immediate, effortless success in installing
> PARI/GP on a small portable computer running Windows Vista, in the directory
> "C:\Pub\PARI-2-6" which will be denoted by VISTAGP hereafter. This being done
> as a normal user, a confirmation screen appeared as it should to request
> elevated privileges, and the existing link to GP 2.4.1 on my desktop was
> modified to point to the new version, which loaded promptly.  After double
> clicking on VISTAGP\Unistall, another confirmation window popped up and the
> newly installed files, desktop link and registry keys were deleted, leaving
> just two modified files (gprc.txt and gp_history.txt) in the VISTAGP
> directory. 
> Installation, removal or updating of this PARI/GP Windows binary is thus
> trivial. You can do it too.

Thanks for your check. I have commited my code to the PARI GIT repository and 
I have released an updated installer (same URL)
<http://pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr/~bill/mingw/PARI-2-6.exe>

> 3. EXTENDED HELP INSTALLATION
> While VISTAGP\doc already contains four very complete documentation files in
> PDF format (Thanks!), the useful "extended help" is not working in this
> binary distribution. The following four steps were needed, after downloading
> and extracting the source from   
>  <http://pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr/pub/pari/snapshots/pari-2.6-362-g84d4114.tar.gz>
> (2.6Mb):A) copy all the files from the source pari-2.6-362-g84d4114\doc to
> VISTAGP\docB) add to VISTAGP\doc the following executable from an earlier
> Windows distribution of PARI/GP:      acro.exe (Aug 12  2006)C) add to
> VISTAGP the following executables and dynamic libraries from an earlier
> distribution:      cygcrypt-0.dll    cygintl-8.dll     cygreadline6.dll     
> cygfltknox-0.dll  cygncurses-8.dll  cygwin1.dll      cygiconv-2.dll  
>  cygperl5_8.dll    libpari-gmp-2.4.dll      perl.exe (5.8.7 Dec 30  2005)    
>  sh.exe (3.2.9 Dec 20  2006)D) 

I think there is a mingw version of perl that we could use instead of cygwin binaries.

> copy the VISTADIR\doc\gphelp.in to VISTADIR\gphelp and modify 4 lines with Wordpad as indicated:
> ============================================================= start of diff log# 
> diff -w doc/gphelp.in gphelp
> 1c1
> < #!@perl@
> ---> #!C:/pub/PARI/perl
> 45,46c45,46
> < $version= "@version@";
> < $datadir= "@datadir@";
> ---> $version= "2.6.0";
> > $datadir= "C:/Pub/PARI";
> 56c56
> < $docdir = &get_docdir();
> ---> $docdir =  "$datadir/doc";
> 170c170
> <   if (-r $docfile) { $pipe = ""; }
> --->   if (-r $docfile||$^O =~ /(cyg|ms)win/) { $pipe = ""; }
> ============================================================= end of diff log

If I may allow a sugestion, you should use the flag -u to generate diff. They are larger
but easier to read.

> 4. DEBUGGING THE EXTENDED HELP INSTALLATION
> ___________________________________
> GP# ??tutorialdisplaying '"tutorial.pdf"'.
> GP#  ..... and nothing more happens .....
> ___________________________________
> VISTAGP\doc\acro.exe finds the Acrobat reader path from its registry key and
> prints the command needed to open the PDF file, according to its C source
> acro.c distributed in the Odos directory of pari-2.4.3; however as in earlier
> versions, the Perl command executed by the gphelp script for "??tutorial",   
>   system( "C:/Program Files/Adobe/Reader 9.0/Reader/AcroRd32.exe"
> "tutorial.pdf" ) then fails silently, perhaps due to the spaces in the path
> names or a disabled system() command in the cygwin DLL, although as seen
> below it is correct in a bash or a cmd.exe shell.

I think we worked around this problem in GIT change ac50e36a681a:
-r ==> -f for cygwin (Vista/7)

> ___________________________________
> GP# ???theta
> ellheight(E,x,\{\fl=2\})
> ellsigma$(E,z,\{\fl=0\})
> nfinit(\var{pol},\{\fl=0\})
> rnfequation$(\var{nf},\var{pol},\{\fl=0\})
> theta(q,z)$thetanullk$(q,k)
> ___________________________________

> In addition, another Perl script, tex2mail, is needed for TeX output, and has
> to be treated in the same way as the gphelp script for Windows. However this
> one needs an outdated Perl module to start,
> <http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/ZEFRAM/perl-5.13.8/lib/newgetopt.pl>, and
> thus some Perl expert is needed to get it working without importing a whole
> Perl installation.

I posted a patch for tex2mail in the pari-dev list to avoid the use of the outdated
module.

Again, thanks for your feedback.

Cheers,
Bill.