Automated win32 build scripts and UPDATE_SOURCES, packaging dir, ...

[Christian Stimming]

Am Samstag, 11. August 2012, 18:23:35 schrieb Geert Janssens:
> I suspect there's only one automated builder in existence for GnuCash on
> Windows, and that's our own build server. So I'll focus on this one only.
> 
> For this builder we have a set of scripts that wrap around the actual
> install script.
> 
> As it happens these scripts already run svn update to get the latest
> build sources in daily_build.sh and weekly_build.sh. This scripts
> consisting of about 5 lines of code. So theoretically the risk of
> invalidating the build script due to the update is here as well.

As the automated builder runs on Windows, there's an additional twist here 
that I haven't seen mentioned: On Windows, the OS will refuse to change a file 
that's currently "in use" by the current process. That is, a script file that 
runs "svn update" (or git pull) by definition is "in use", and its svn/git 
child process will be refused to change this very script file. Essentially, if 
the script runs an update that will change itself, the update will fail with 
some very weird error message because of this.

Hence, the "invalidation" of the script file might be one issue, but Windows' 
refusal to change the currently active script file is another. Because of 
this, the main update/pull of the working copy needs to be somewhere else than 
the actual script file. At least that's my understanding of this.

Regards,

Christian