Help for meson needed

[achimste]

Hi everyone,

I am not a Linux guy nor doing stuff with mingw, I solely use MS Visual Studio. So here is my problem.

I have a running Python system on my machine, MS VS 2022 and I have installed meson with the pip3 command. Too bad there is no msi file for Windows as promised.

In short: Although I following the instructions to compile the lib with meson under a vs environment, it doesn't work. I can see the compiler starting, but then chaos starts. Output tells me, it cannot find standard includes and it doesn't understand the compiler flags (e.g. tries to compile with C++14)

Here are the steps to reproduce:
Install python3 latest with installer -> working
get meson with pip3 command - work, it installed
For convenience I copied the meson.exe from that cryptic folder in AppData to the chess-lib-master folder

I ran the following commands in a terminal under Visual Studio

meson.exe setup build --backend=vs
meson.exe compile -C build
meson.exe test -C build

setup seems ok, no red flags. compiling completely fails. Seems the options are wrong or simply not passed to the compiler command, idk.

If anyone here has a solution for me, I'd be a happy man.

Best regards
Achim

[achimste]

Update: I managed to make the whole thing compile with meson under a MSYS2 environment. So far so good.

But here comes the next kicker.
@Disservin maybe you can help me? After successful compilation the build also produces the SHL chess.hpp.
I set up a branch on my fork to play around. The build changes chess.hpp in a way, that github thinks it is whole new file, showing me changes all over the place, though the changes in the src files (just some minor changes) are shown correctly.

Disservin thought I made a mistake. No I didnt, meson build was successful. I wrap my head around this shenanigan but can't solve it. Maybe someone of you?

Regards
Achim

[Disservin]

The problem is the line endings of the file. The file in your PR had CRLF, whereas the one in git has LF.
Doing

git config core.autocrlf false
git config core.eol lf

in the repository locally should hopefully fix that for the future?

[achimste]

Ok. Problem solved.
Indeed the culprit was the CRLF thingy in Windows. I have written a little exe that simply removes the CR. I tested it within a private branch, et voila, the chess.hpp file showed the correct changes.

@Disservin: If you like, I can include this little tool in the tools folder. A simple click and the include/chess.hpp will be corrected.

[Disservin]

don't think it'd be good to add something like that especially a plain exe, if anything the shl.py can be updated to correct the LE's if they are wrong

[achimste]

The exe and bat is for windows only users and it works perfectly. So I see this as a plus when it comes to cross-platform usage.
Even the meson setup under windows (with MSYS2) produced a wrong chess.hpp.

[Disservin]

i wanted to have this python change since this doesn't require some windows bat or other unnecessary things
2ecd33e

[achimste]

Thanks for your help. The problems could be resolved.