Building on Windows from scratch

[Derek Atkins]

Hi,

Gary Bilkus <mail at gary.bilkus.com> writes:

> Has anyone actually succeeded in following the instructions on the
> wiki page http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Windows/Development from
> scratch and ending up with a working gnucash. Or is there some other
> hidden set of instructions.....
>
>  
> I have tried to build gnucash on windows several times and have never
> succeeded. It's clearly possible, because there's a windows version
> out there. So what's the secret?
>
>  
> All I can see in the archives are various other people who have
> problems, no complete solution.
>
>  
> I'm running Windows 7 64 bit. Almost every stage seems to fail - wget
> won't download automatically, crypt libraries are missing when you get
> wget, other libraries don't compile. I follow various threads to fix
> the problems, and finally get an executable which just crashes.
>
>  
> Surely someone must know how to do this correctly?

What GnuCash development are you interested in performing that you are
trying to build from scratch?  Most of the development happens on Linux,
so unless you're going to work on a Windows-specific feature you might
consider developing there.  Also, if you're developing reports in scheme
then you don't even need a development environment, per se.

Note that the Windows builder server is running XP 32-bit.
I don't know what other devs are using for windows builds.

One issue we have is that the build server keeps the dependency
downloads around and continues to use them, so the upstream locations
may change or get lost, making the URLs invalid over time.

I've asked that we host the dependencies ourselves but nobody seems to
want to do that (or at least nobody has taken the time to make it
happen, myself included).  So my initial guess is that some of the
dependencies are no longer available, or the instructions are slightly
out of date w.r.t. the base system you have.  Or there really could just
be issues on Win7, as that's what lots of people have had issues on.

> Thanks,
>
> Gary 

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available