Installing system dependencies on Windows using vcpkg

[traversaro]

At the moment, in the official documentation we recommend to install most of the "System Dependencies" on Windows using the YARP and iCub dependency installers.

However, expert users may prefer to use vcpkg. As already discussed in the past, I think in the long term the most maintainable solution is to generated our installer from vcpkg packages (see robotology-playground/vcpkg-cpack#2 for a related discussion). However, until we find the time to work on that, I don't think vcpkg is suitable to be used by every user, due to the long time necessary for the compilation of some packages (qt5).

For the time being, I will just keep on this issue the vcpkg package that provide the necessary dependencies for each superbuild profile.
Note: use --triplet x86-windows if you want to build packages for 32 bit.

ROBOTOLOGY_ENABLE_CORE

 ./vcpkg install --triplet x64-windows ace gsl eigen3 opencv freeglut ode sdl1 sdl2 qt5

Note: qt5 now is split in several smaller subpackages, we should identify the one that are actually necessary for YARP/iCub GUIs.

ROBOTOLOGY_ENABLE_IHMC

 ./vcpkg install --triplet x64-windows asio

ROBOTOLOGY_USES_GAZEBO

Work in progress at https://github.com/traversaro/gazebo-superbuild#windows .

[traversaro]

@diegoferigo @fiorisi @claudiofantacci please update and correct if necessary.

[diegoferigo]

Building dependencies on a fresh Windows setup right now targeting ROBOTOLOGY_ENABLE_CORE.

[traversaro]

Based on the packages documented in http://www.yarp.it/dependencies.html#dependencies_qt5_Linux , I think it should be sufficient to install the qt5-declarative and qt5-multimedia vcpkg ports (and transitively their dependencies) to get the YARP GUIs to work, but I never tried.

[diegoferigo]

Yes thanks, I was going to try exactly the same thing. In my linux environment generator, I have the following qt-related dependencies for YARP:

libqcustomplot-dev
qtmultimedia5-dev
qtdeclarative5-dev
libqt5opengl5-dev
qttools5-dev

[traversaro]

For anyone finding this old issue on Google, the updated version of these docs is available at https://github.com/robotology/robotology-superbuild#system-libraries .