Installing Chaste on Cygwin (experimental)

I've been experimenting on my laptop, mostly following source:tags/release_1/README_INSTALLATION.txt

I installed Boost via cygwin.

MPI configuration is different, since cygwin doesn't support ch_shmem:

./configure --prefix=$CHASTE_LIBS/mpi --enable-sharedlib --disable-f77 --with-device=ch_p4 -rsh=ssh

After installation I then edited $CHASTE_LIBS/mpi/share/machines.CYGWIN_NT to list 127.0.0.1 twice (dual-core machine). You'll need to add an exception for sshd in the Windows firewall if you don't want lots of 'this program has been blocked' popups. (Although my firewall seems to have a habit of ignoring this exception when it feels like it.)

I also haven't installed tetgen or triangle.

Some changes are needed to the Chaste build system (and some #includes - these may also help on MacOS); see r5604 and r5612.

To build the standalone executable, we need a static xerces. Just doing the following after the section in the installation guide worked for me:

# Create a static library (this is a bit of a hack!)
cd $XERCESCROOT/obj/CYGWIN
ar cru libxerces-c.a `find . -name "*.o"`
ranlib libxerces-c.a
mv libxerces-c.a $CHASTE_LIBS/xerces/lib/

We also need a different XSD:

cd $CHASTE_LIBS
wget http://www.codesynthesis.com/download/xsd/2.3/windows/i686/xsd-2.3.1-i686-windows.zip
unzip xsd-2.3.1-i686-windows.zip
ln -s $CHASTE_LIBS/xsd-2.3.1-i686-windows/bin/xsd.exe $CHASTE_LIBS/bin/xsd.exe

#1008: While I did manage to get the executable to build and run successfully, I haven't yet managed to get many of the continuous tests to pass. Currently I'm up to "Failed 42 out of 141 test suites"; many of them just die with no output, which is a pain to debug! There also appear to be issues relating to archiving; this may be a boost 1.33 issue, or something different. File handling in general is dodgy on Windows (see e.g. r5911). And of course I don't have the tetgen binary installed yet, so that breaks some remeshing tests.