[Xapian-devel] Re: [Xapian-commits] 7990:trunk/xapian-core/trunk/xapian-core/bin/trunk/xapian-core/tests/harness/

[Olly Betts]

On Mon, Apr 02, 2007 at 12:51:51PM +1000, Mark Hammond wrote:
> Oops - yes, my apologies, that is almost certainly what happened.  The trunk
> now builds for me - thanks.

Cool.

> In my feeble defense though, the current win32 build process is fairly error
> prone.  It requires you to manually copy files from one directory to
> another, then start the build process, which itself then copies those files
> into yet other directories.  This first manual step is easy to forget, and
> would seem to work against a tinderbox type system working for windows
> out-of-the-box.

The tinderbox works from bootstrapped tarballs rather than SVN.  This
avoids needing lots of developer tools installed on each building host
and makes the tinderbox build very much like a user building source.

So I imagine a Windows tinderbox build would start from the bootstrapped
tarballs and a zip of the MSVC build files.

> Is there a reason for the intermediate 'xapian-core/win32' directory?

I've not tried it myself, but isn't that what you get from unpacking the
zip file, which is where users building releases will start from.

The main reason for not packaging the MSVC build files with the tarballs
is because they generally lag behind releases a little.  I'm not able to
update them myself (well not and test the results) so having to wait for
updated MSVC build files would become an obstacle to making releases.

> Is there any reason we can't tweak the top-level makefile to copy the files
> directly from xapian-maintainer-tools/win32msvc directory directly into the
> xapian-core tree, and thereby allowing the make process to run directly from
> the source of the makefiles?

We need to know if this is a build from a tarball or SVN, but we could
probably test for the presence of an suitable file.  But it's Richard or
Charlie you need to convince really.

> And while on this topic, it did take me some time to work out how to get
> started building on Windows.  I'd like to suggest a patch similar to the
> following to help MSVC builders who follow (but obviously the text would
> change if we tweaked the build process as described above.)

Sounds reasonable, though I think it should be with the "Building from
SVN" section and be called "Building from SVN on Windows with MSVC" -
we want to make it clear that this only applies when building from SVN.

Actually, won't all but the first step be the same for building from
the zipped build files?  In which case it's perhaps better to avoid
duplicating information (since the copies will just diverge over time)
and just say "copy all files from xapian-maintainer-tools/win32msvc to
xapian-core/win32 and then follow the instructions in win32/README
as if you'd just unpacked the files from the zip archive".

Cheers,
    Olly