Problem 1729

Summary: Missing installation information
Product: Documentation Reporter: Tom Roberts <tjrob>
Component: Installation GuideAssignee: Ben Morgan <Ben.Morgan>
Status: CLOSED FIXED    
Severity: normal CC: kelsey
Priority: P5    
Version: 10.1   
Hardware: All   
OS: Windows   

Description Tom Roberts 2015-04-07 17:33:37 CEST 
In the installation guide, the only instructions for Windows are for the GUI versions of Cmake and Visual Studio.

Apparently you don't realize how serious a burden this puts on people like me who support a Geant4-based program; and worse, the burden this puts on my users. When I build a new release of G4beamline, I build it over a dozen times, on three different OS-s, and on several different versions of each OS. Not only is it very slow and painful to do this via GUIs, the likelihood of my not making any mistakes becomes vanishingly small with so many repetitions. 

Even worse, I have users who need to build from source, and I must communicate to them how to do it. It is VASTLY better if I can simply supply a script to them (as I have in the past). I have no expectation that the physicists who use G4beamline will be able to deal with those GUIs and the complex configurations required in them.

In previous versions there were instructions on how to script the Geant4 build, using bash (on Windows via Cygwin). PLEASE do this for your latest and future versions.

My Windows/Cygwin script that worked in 9.6 fails in 10.1 (Cmake errors). I will pursue this in the forum. But the underlying problem is lack of documentation for a scriptable installation. BTW my Mac OS X script does work in 10.1. (My scripts on all 3 OSs are quite similar.)
Comment 1 Michael Kelsey 2015-04-10 18:27:21 CEST 
I have passed this on to Ben Morgan, who is our CMake expert and responsible for the Installation Guide.
Comment 2 Ben Morgan 2015-04-13 13:07:17 CEST 
A guide will be added, though please note that Cygwin is not directly supported nor tested (i.e. every effort is made to support portability but Geant4 can not offer any guarantee of this - nevertheless, reports like this and patches are welcome).

Geant4 always try to support as many use cases and platforms as possible. Many of our developers contribute on a part time or voluntary basis, and we are not omniscient.
Comment 3 Ben Morgan 2015-11-25 18:42:35 CET 
The updated documentation in 10.2 will cover building on Windows from cmd/Powershell and Visual Studio. Notes are added to clarify that Cygwin/MSYS are not supported, but for use cases such as this, reference should be made to the UNIX command line instructions.