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

[Derek Atkins]

Christian Stimming <christian at cstimming.de> writes:

> 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.

The one that matters most, I believe, is the "gnucash.bat".  Luckily
that one doesn't update frequently, so I think we can manually update
that as necessary.  But yes, I do believe we have hit this issue before.

Thank you for bringing it up again so we don't collectively forget.

> Regards,
>
> Christian

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
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