Linux: Windows:

About Mdt

Mdt is set of libraries, based on Qt5, that should help (in some future) interacting with some common instruments.

Libraries

Mdt provides several libraries, placed in the libs directory. Each library has a name, like Application, and is placed in a subdirectoy of the same name as base. To reduce depenencies, some of them are splitted (for example Application_Core, which depends on Qt5Core, or Application_Widgets, which also depends on Qt5Widgets).

To see currently available libraries, please take a look at the API documentation .

Get Mdt

Release

For some platforms, binary distributions are available here .

See the INSTALL file to know how to setup Mdt.

Latest source code

The source code is also available on github.

Linux

At first, we have to install git. On a Debian system:

sudo apt-get install git

Then, create a directory to put Mdt and cd to it, for example:

mkdir -p ~/opt/mdt/src
cd ~/opt/mdt/src
git clone git://github.com/scandyna/multidiagtools.git

Windows

At first, we have to install git. Get a version that corresponds to your platform in the Downloads section. While running the installer, I personally accepted default settings, mainly:

• "Windows explorer integration" options
• "Use Git from the Windows Command Prompt" which adds git to the PATH.
• "Use the OpenSSL library"
• "Checkout Windows-style, commit Unix-style line endings"

Then, create a directory to put Mdt and navigate to it, then right-click and choose "Git Bash Here". Finaly, clone the Mdt repository:

git clone git://github.com/scandyna/multidiagtools.git

Use Mdt

To see how to build a application using Mdt, see the Application example .

Compile Mdt

At first, take a look at the INSTALL file and install Mdt dependencies .

Linux

This section was tested on a Ubuntu 16.04 system.

Tools and other dependencies

To install Mdt, one option is to generate basic Debian packages (covered later in this documentation). For this, following dependencies are also needed:

sudo apt-get install dpkg dpkg-dev

Install Boost

Mdt uses some Boost libraries. Installing it on a Debian system looks like:

sudo apt-get install libboost-dev

Optionnally, documentation can also be installed:

sudo apt-get install libboost-doc

Compile Mdt on Linux

At first, init the source tree, create a build directory and cd to it:

cd ~/opt/mdt/src/multidiagtools
mkdir -p build/release
cd build/release

To avoid specifying to many options, Mdt provides some cache files that set common flags. For example, for a release build with gcc, use:

cmake -C ../../cmake/caches/ReleaseGcc.cmake ../../

It is also possible to specify the intallation prefix:

cmake -C ../../cmake/caches/ReleaseGcc.cmake -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=~/opt/mdt/release ../../

To use a Qt5 library that is not installed in the default path, we have also to specify it:

cmake -C ../../cmake/caches/ReleaseGcc.cmake -D QT_PREFIX_PATH=~/opt/qt/Qt5/5.9.1/gcc_64/ ../../

This is my personnal case to build Mdt in debug mode, and install it locally:

cmake -C ../../cmake/caches/DebugGcc.cmake -D QT_PREFIX_PATH=~/opt/qt/Qt5/5.9.1/gcc_64/ -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=~/opt/mdt/debug ../../

Build (-j4 is for parallel build, allowing max. 4 processes):

make -j4

To run all tests:

make test

Install Mdt on Linux

Install in a predefined location

Note that this method is not recommanded for a system wide installation.

To install the library in a non system place, i.e. defined above with CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX, the installation is:

make install

If you don't have a recent enough version of Qt installed on your system (in /usr/lib), run the post install script .

Generate a package

To generate a tbz2 archive, from the build directory:

cpack -G TBZ2 .

The genarted archive will contain the Mdt libraries, translations, etc..

To install Mdt from a binary archive, see the INSTALL file.

CPack can generate other packages. To have a list of packages generators that cpack has on your platform, use:

cpack --help

Please note that some generators needs some informations that Mdt does currently not provide.

Install system wide on Debian

Please note: this method should only work if Mdt depends on Qt5 library that is installed system wide (not specified in QT_PREFIX_PATH).

This section will briefly describe how to generate packages. Example to create Debian packages:

rm *.deb
make package_debian

To install all generated Debian packages, dpkg can be used:

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

To install only a subset of them, using dpkg can be tricky, because it does not handles dependencies automatically. It seems also that apt-get (and other tools based on it) can only work with a repository. A possible way to create a local repository is: Create a directory that will contain the Debian packages:

mkdir -p /home/you/opt/mdt/debs

Add a list file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ :

sudo echo "deb [trusted=yes] file:///home/you/opt/mdt/debs/ ./" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/you_mdt_local.list

Copy the generated Debian packages and the package index file:

cp *.deb Packages.gz /home/you/opt/mdt/debs/

Update packages database to take the new local packages in account:

sudo apt-get update

Now, the packages can be installed with apt-get, Synaptic, etc.. Please note that generated packages are not fully compliant to Debian policy. The dependencies are currently not complete. For example, Sql-dev depends on qt5base5-dev, but the this is missing in the generated package. For details on creating good Debian packages, see the Debian packaging documentation

Windows

This section will suggest how to compile Mdt on a Windows machine, as well as cross-compile it for Windows from a Linux machine.

Compile Mdt on a windows machine

This section was tested on Windows 10 x86-64.

Install Boost

It is recommanded to have a look at the documentation in the "Getting stated" section.

We will install Boost libraries to the Windows Program Files. When doing so, CMake will be able to find it automatically.

Create a directory named "boost" in C:\Program Files .

Get a Boost archive from the Download section and put it somewhere.

Extract the archive to C:\Program Files\boost .

Compile Mdt on Windows

For this section, it will be considered that the Mdt source tree is: %HOMEPATH%\Documents\opt\Mdt\src\multidiagtools\

In the root of Mdt source tree, create a directory called "build", and a subdirectory called "release".

Open the Qt command prompt (Start/Windows menu -> Qt -> Qt x.y.z for Desktop. Go to the created build directory:

cd %HOMEPATH%\Documents\opt\Mdt\src\multidiagtools\build\release

To avoid specifying to many options, Mdt provides some cache files that set common flags. For example, for a release build with gcc and make, use:

cmake -C ..\..\cmake\caches\ReleaseGcc.cmake -G "MinGW Makefiles" ..\..\

It is also possible to specify the intallation prefix:

cmake -C ..\..\cmake\caches\ReleaseGcc.cmake -G "MinGW Makefiles" -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX="C:/Users/You/Documents/opt/Mdt/release" ..\..\

Build (-j4 is for parallel build, allowing max. 4 processes):

mingw32-make -j4

To run all tests:

mingw32-make test

During build directory initialization, a script called mdtenv.bat was generated, which setups a environment, like qtenv2.bat does. It will set the PATH to include:

• Path to the executable directory of the compiler
• Path to the executable directory of the Qt5 library used to compile Mdt

To run a command prompt with this environment set, you can create a shortcut that runs cmd.exe and calls this mdtenv.bat. Example of options of that shortcut could be:

• Target: C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /A /Q /K C:\path\to\mdtenv.bat
• Run in: where you want to be after launching the shortcut

Install Mdt on Windows

Install in a predefined location

To install the library in a non system place, i.e. defined above with CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX, the installation is:

mingw32-make install

Cross compile Mdt for Windows on a Linux machine

My first attempt was to install Wine (then WineHQ) and all tools and libraries on it, but this did not work for me.

Here we will use MXE to do cross-compilation. You probably will use WineHQ to do some tests, in which case, please remeber that WineHQ is possibly not able to run 64 bit executables.

Install WineHQ

WineHQ will be needed later to run the unit tests. Wine can also be usefull to use, for example, dependency Walker, or to check if your application works.

Please also note, for the nexte sections, that WineHQ probably not support 64 bit executable.

Using Ubuntu 16.04, I personally installed WineHQ successfully by following the instructions avaiable on WineHQ website, in the Download section. Note: while running winecfg, I had to enable the option that emulates a desktop, for some tools. This is described here: https://doc.ubuntu-fr.org/wine

Install other dependencies

Later, we will see that some dependecies must be copied to be able to run the unit tests. For this, the objdump tool is needed. On Debian, objdump is part of the binutils package:

sudo apt-get install binutils

Install MXE

MXE is a powerfull cross-compiler suite that will build all that we need. Take a look at MXE site for details. As stated in the documentation, once MXE is built, it is not relocatable. To reuse it for your own project, install it somwhere else than in Mdt source tree. In my case, I choosed ~/opt/build/cross as base:

mkdir -p ~/opt/build/cross

cd build/release MXE has a good step by step Tutorial, simply follow it to install dependencies for your platform.

To make a 32 bit and 64 bit cross compiler that support boost, Qt5 and qwt:

cd ~/opt/build/cross
git clone https://github.com/mxe/mxe.git
cd mxe
make MXE_TARGETS='i686-w64-mingw32.shared.posix x86_64-w64-mingw32.shared.posix' boost qt5 qwt -j4

As described in the documentation, MXE will get and build the dependencies of the libraries we just specified. The compilation will take some while.

Cross compile Mdt for Windows

Mdt uses CMake as build tool. Compilation will be done in 2 phases:

• Compile Mdt deploy utils for the native (Linux) platform
• Cross-compile Mdt for Windows using MXE For this, a helper script is avaliable in root of Mdt sources.

Go to Mdt source tree and create a directory to build a Windows 32 bit version:

mkdir -p build/cross/win32/release
cd build/cross/win32/release

Run the helper script by specify the MXE installation path, target architecture and Mdt installation target path:

../../../../build_cross_linux_to_windows.sh --mxe-path=~/opt/build/cross/mxe/usr/bin -t=win32 --install-prefix=~/opt/mdt/win32/release ../../../../

To run all unit tests:

make test

CMake generated what is needed to call wine to run each unit test.

Note: for some reason, sometimes all tests fails, mostly at the first run. In this case, simply run them again.

To run a single unit test, invoke wine, for example:

wine bin/mdtalgorithmtest.exe

To recompile some parts (or all):

make -j4