Successfully built ceres-solver on windows platform

[Arturo Flores]

After a lot of trial and error, I was able to successfully build ceres-solver on windows.  The instructions found here: http://ceres-solver.org/building.html#windows are either out-dated or simply do not work.  I can provide the details and possibly contribute updated/better instructions for building ceres-solver on windows.  Let me know if this would be useful.

One of the major issues was linking to suitesparse.  The instructions suggest using the suitesparse-metis-for-windows project.  This project comes with pre-built blas and lapack libraries.  However the root CMakeLists.txt file tries to find these libraries and it ends up calling the FindLapack.cmake and FindBLAS.cmake files that ship with cmake.  I did not see an obvious way of telling it to look for lapack and blas in the suitesparse folder.  I also ended up replacing the FindSuiteSparse.cmake file that comes with ceres and used the one included in the suitesparse-metis-for-windows project.

All tests run and pass, though the tests take slightly longer on windows than on a linux virtual machine ( host was the same windows machine ).  Total test time under windows is around 150 seconds (multiple runs).  Total test time under linux is around 120 seconds (multiple runs).

Arturo

[Sameer Agarwal]

Arturo,
Any and a help to update the instructions is welcome. The best would be if you submitted a change list that we can review.
Sameer

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[Arturo Flores]

What would be the best way to submit the change list?

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[Sameer Agarwal]

Please edit

docs/source/building.rst

and submit for review by following

http://ceres-solver.org/contributing.html

Sameer

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[Arturo Flores]

What's the procedure for building the documentation on windows?

I installed python 2.7.11 and sphinx via pip .  On the command line, I went to the scripts folder and tried running:

python make_docs.py .. ../docs/html

I get error:

Running Sphinx v1.4.1

Exception occurred:

  File "conf.py", line 103, in <module>

ImportError: No module named sphinx_rtd_theme

The full traceback has been saved in c:\users\aflores\appdata\local\temp\sphinx-

err-75syx_.log, if you want to report the issue to the developers.

Please also report this if it was a user error, so that a better error message c

an be provided next time.

A bug report can be filed in the tracker at <https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphin

x/issues>. Thanks!

Does anyone know if it is possible to build the docs on windows?

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[Sameer Agarwal]

Arturo,

We use the "Read the docs" Theme for Sphinx.

https://github.com/snide/sphinx_rtd_theme

You likely have to install it before trying to build the docs.

Sameer

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[Keir Mierle]

Hi Arturo,

Thank you for volunteering to help with the Windows documentation! None of the core Ceres devs uses Ceres with Windows, and so those instructions tend to get out of date. If you could also add a section on getting Sphinx compiled and working (on Windows) that would be amazing too. I'm sorry it took you so long, but by adding the docs you can help save other people time.

Thanks,

Keir

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