[mpich-discuss] Notes on configuration to build MPICH2 on Windows

[Scott Robison]

After spending a lot of time trying to get things configured, I
thought I'd type up some notes that clarify / explain things from the
documentation that I had to puzzle out on my own and were not
explained anywhere:

1. While it is in the documentation, I felt it is easy to overlook the
fact that you'll need perl.

2. You'll need an SDK from Microsoft. I downloaded HPC Pack 2008 SDK
with Service Pack 1 (SP1) and it *seems* to be working (at least
supporting configuration).

3. By default .wsf files are run by wscript, which isn't ideal for
winconfigure.wsf. Explicitly use cscript by typing "cscript
winconfigure.wsf [options]" at the command line.

4. An error is generated trying to open src\pmi. This is due to an
extraneous newline character at the end of the line in
maint\errmsgdirs. This isn't a problem on posix systems due to the
different end-of-line convention, but it creates a problem for at
least some Windows environments. As soon as I removed the extra
newline I no longer had an error trying to open src\pmi (as it was now
accessing "src\\pmi" instead of "src\\pmi\n").

I hope someone will find these observations useful.

Scott Robison