Building WeiDU

Requirements and build environment

The version of OCaml needs to be greater than or equal to 4.04 and configured without forced safe strings.

The Windows Unicode dilemma

If WeiDU is built with OCaml greater than or equal to 4.06 on Windows and the environment variable WINDOWS_UNICODE_MODE is not set to ansi when configuring the OCaml build, the resulting WeiDU will be incompatible with mods that rely on legacy behaviour, notably the mod Infinity Animations.

However, if WeiDU on Windows is built without Unicode-support, mods that print Unicode characters to the terminal will be unable to do so. This unsurprisingly include many mods that target languages that use non-Latin alphabets.

Refer to the relevant section of the OCaml documentation for more information.

GNU/Linux

• OCaml with native compilers. You either need to use opam or compile OCaml from source, as WeiDU requires unsafe strings. With opam, you can obtain a suitable version by creating a switch: opam switch create 4.11.2+default-unsafe-string

• A basic GCC tool chain with make. This might come pre-installed.

• Perl, which is normally installed by default.

• Optionally, also git, hevea, texlive, zip and upx. HeVeA and TexLive are only needed to build the documentation and zip and upx are used in making the distributable archives (upx is optional).

• Elkhound (vide infra). Place the executable on you path and allow Elkhound to be executed as a program, for example, by using the terminal command chmod +x path/to/elkhound

Windows

N.B. These instructions may not be step-for-step accurate, as no one who develops WeiDU do so from Windows systems, so there is no current first-hand experience.

• Native OCaml without forced safe strings, typically obtained through opam: opam switch create --packages=ocaml-option-default-unsafe-string ocaml-variants.4.14.2+options

• A Cygwin-based *nix tool chain, particularly binutils and make from the Devel group. Perl is also required but is typically installed by default. Optionally also git (Devel), openssh (Net), zip (Archive) and upx (Utils).

• Cygwin-hosted MinGW-GCC, called mingw-gcc-core, or some such.

• Elkhound (vide infra). For less configuration, place the elkhound binary in Cygwin's /bin directory, or equivalent. The build process does not like paths with spaces.

MacOS

• A basic GCC tool chain with make.

• Install Perl (using MacPorts or HomeBrew, for example).

• OCaml with native compilers. You either need to use opam or compile OCaml from source, as WeiDU requires unsafe strings. With opam, you can obtain a suitable version by creating a switch: opam switch create 4.11.2+default-unsafe-string

• Optionally, install UPX. UPX is used to compress the compiled programs, but is not available for all platforms.

• Obtain Elkhound (vide infra) and place the executable on your path. Allow Elkhound to be executed as a program, for example, by using the terminal command chmod +x path/to/elkhound

Elkhound

The source code and build instructions for Elkhound are available at GitHub. There are also compiled executables for some platforms available under Releases. Windows builds without a Cygwin-dependency, as well as ARM builds for MacOS can be obtained here.

Compiling WeiDU

First time compiling

• Obtain WeiDU's source code. The recommended way is by using git: git clone git://github.com/WeiDUorg/weidu.git your/directory Bear in mind WeiDU builds distribution packages to the directory one level up from where the source is located.

If you have compiled before

• Make sure you have the up-to-date WeiDU source. The recommended way is by using git (from inside the directory where you keep your WeiDU source code): git pull origin

Finally

• Check out the branch from which you wish to compile WeiDU. If you are building a stable version, check out the master branch. If your are building a beta version, check out the devel branch. From inside your WeiDU source directory, you check out the branch with: git checkout branch, where branch is the branch you wish to check out.

• Run make. Relevant build targets are

• clean
• weidu
• weinstall
• tolower
• doc
• windows_zip
• linux_zip
• osx_zip
• src_zip

The *_zip targets produce an archive in .. that is suitable for distribution. If you are not developing WeiDU, you probably want one of windows_zip, linux_zip or osx_zip.