Elijah Robison | GIS Blog

So I just installed the mapnik 2.0.1 binaries for Windows, and I ran into a “gotcha.” I couldn’t figure this out by Googling, so hopefully this post will help someone.  (Be sure to note the embarrassing conclusion.)

Specifically, following a fresh mapnik install, rundemo.exe told me this:

C:\mapnik-2.0.1rc0\demo\c++>rundemo.exe
usage: ./rundemo <mapnik_install_dir>
Usually /usr/local/lib/mapnik
Warning: ./rundemo looks for data in ../data/,
Therefore must be run from within the demo/c++ folder.

Note the first bit:  usage: ./rundemo <mapnik_install_dir>

Well ok, that’s fine. Except this didn’t work, either:

C:\mapnik-2.0.1rc0\demo\c++>rundemo C:\mapnik-2.0.1rc0
running demo …
looking for ‘shape.input’ plugin in… C:\mapnik-2.0.1rc0/input/
looking for DejaVuSans font in… C:\mapnik-2.0.1rc0/fonts/DejaVuSans.ttf
### Configuration error: Could not create datasource. No plugin found for type ‘shape’ (searched in: C:\mapnik-2.0.1rc0/input/)

Hmm, but that is my install path??

Anyway, I finally figured it out. This works:

C:\mapnik-2.0.1rc0\demo\c++>rundemo C:/mapnik-2.0.1rc0/lib/mapnik
running demo …
[… yadda yadda …]

Now for the embarrassing part—I was juxtaposing between this install tutorial and this other install tutorial, and clearly I did not pay close attention to the second. It turns out, if my eyes were peeled, I might have noticed this:

Then you should be able to run the demo program:

cd c:\mapnik-2.0.1rc0\demo\c++ rundemo ..\..\lib\mapnik

I’d like to quote Donald Knuth and re-state: “Software is hard”, but this is just a good, old-fashioned case of I-was-dumb. Nevertheless, I was stumped and Googling didn’t help, so maybe this will save some the confusion. :/

“You know those guitars that are like ..double guitars?!?!”