How to install on Windows 11

Using Aravis
1

I see the documentation really briefly touches on installing on Windows, but doesn’t give any real detail on how to accomplish it. For example, idk what the hell I’m supposed to do with the instruction: “The build process itself is the same as on other platforms (meson/ninja)” considering I’ve never even heard of meson or ninja before…

Can someone provide a step by step on how to actually install?

2

Hello !

I agree with you on that : ) It took me some time to get the dll. I am not a professional but I will try to help you.
Here is what I did :

  1. Install MSYS2
  2. launch the mingw64 terminal that you will find in the msys folder ( You will find it in program files or directly C: I think)
  3. Type several commands to install things you need :
    pacman -Syu

pacman -S git mingw-w64-x86_64-meson mingw-w64-x86_64-ninja
mingw-w64-x86_64-glib2 mingw-w64-x86_64-gtk3
mingw-w64-x86_64-libxml2 mingw-w64-x86_64-gobject-introspection
mingw-w64-x86_64-gtk-doc mingw-w64-x86_64-libusb

And just in case :
pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc mingw-w64-x86_64-pkg-config

You may have to restart your computer.

  1. Lauch the terminal again, and go to the folder where you put aravis source code (‘cd [path]’).

  2. Setup the meson build with the command :
    meson setup build --prefix=$(pwd)/install

  3. Compile and get the dll :
    meson compile -C build

So These are the basic steps. For me I had to reconfigure my PATH variable because I have other mingw compiler on my computer that I use with other projects. I also made a .txt that I include in the meson setup to make sure I use the good compiler.

Also if you just want the dll you can deactivate some things in the meson setup command by adding :
-Dintrospection=false (or maybe it’s -Dintrospection=disabled, I don’t remember). You can do it with the viewer too : -Dviewer=false. If you need the viewer you will have to install other dependencies (Gstreamer).

Then you should be able to compile and get your dll in the build file (if you don’t find it just search ‘.dll’ in the entire folder, that’s what I did lol).

I hope this helped to some degree. If you have any question don’t hesitate I will answer to the best of my abilities.

3

Aravis is a library, meaning it is made for programmers, and uses tooling common under Linux (which also works under Windows). If you never heard of meson/ninja, educate yourself instead of informing us about that. Aravis is packaged for msys2 and conan, in case you want to avoid building it yourself.