h5utils not compiling with Cygwin

[FilipDominec]

From @emma-branigan on June 29, 2017 11:43

I've been trying to install Meep and Python-Meep on Win7 with Cygwin by following the tutorial linked below:
http://novelresearch.weebly.com/installing-meep-in-windows-8-via-cygwin.html

I've also had a look at two other tutorials:
https://www.mail-archive.com/meep-discuss@ab-initio.mit.edu/msg03793.html
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.science.electromagnetism.meep.general/3428

All three seem to be similar but with small differences. I'm unsure as to which method will best install Meep on a Windows 7 platform. When following the 1st tutorial I didn't get past the first hurdle. When compiling h5utils, the following error was the result:

make[1]: Entering directory '/cygdrive/c/cygwin/usr/local/h5utils-1.12.1'
gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -I/usr/local/include -g -O2 -MT writepng.o -MD -MP -MF .deps/writepng.Tpo -c -o writepng.o writepng.c
writepng.c: In function ‘writepng’:
writepng.c:312:24: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type ‘png_struct {aka struct png_struct_def}’
if (setjmp(png_ptr->jmpbuf)) {
^
writepng.c:437:19: error: dereferencing pointer to incomplete type ‘png_info {aka struct png_info_def}’
free(info_ptr->palette);
^
make[1]: *** [Makefile:426: writepng.o] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory '/cygdrive/c/cygwin/usr/local/h5utils-1.12.1'
make: *** [Makefile:278: all] Error 2

The author dismisses any errors with h5utils in this tutorial saying that MatLab is more capable for processing. However, it seems that due to this failure h5topng is not found and without having access to MatLab, my outputs are useless.

When trying to run 'ring.ctl' from the Meep/examples folder I also get the following:

creating output file "./ring-eps-000000.00.h5"...
Backtrace:
In /pub/devel/guile/yaakov/guile-2.0.14-1.i686/src/guile-2.0.14/module/ice-9/boot-9.scm:
160: 12 [catch #t #<catch-closure 801d0950> ...]
In unknown file:
?: 11 [apply-smob/1 #<catch-closure 801d0950>]
In /pub/devel/guile/yaakov/guile-2.0.14-1.i686/src/guile-2.0.14/module/ice-9/eval.scm:
432: 10 [eval # #]
432: 9 [eval # #]
In unknown file:
?: 8 [primitive-load "ring.ctl"]
In /pub/devel/guile/yaakov/guile-2.0.14-1.i686/src/guile-2.0.14/module/ice-9/eval.scm:
432: 7 [eval # #]
In /pub/devel/guile/yaakov/guile-2.0.14-1.i686/src/guile-2.0.14/module/ice-9/boot-9.scm:
710: 6 Exception thrown while printing backtrace:
ERROR: In procedure delete-meep-volume: Wrong type argument in position 1: #<finalized smob 80447d00>
ERROR: In procedure %run-finalizers:
ERROR: In procedure delete-meep-volume: Wrong type argument in position 1: #<finalized smob 80447ef0>
Some deprecated features have been used. Set the environment
variable GUILE_WARN_DEPRECATED to "detailed" and rerun the
program to get more information. Set it to "no" to suppress
this message.

Any thoughts on what might be happening with Meep would be very helpful. It's been a number of days trying to get it to install correctly on both Windows and Ubuntu.

Emma

Copied from original issue: FilipDominec/python-meep-utils#7