Building on Windows from scratch

[Gary Bilkus]

On 21/12/2013 14:44, Geert Janssens wrote:
>
> On Friday 20 December 2013 18:34:50 Gary Bilkus wrote:
>
> > Hi Geert,
>
> >
>
> > If you're already well into solving the problem, I'd be very happy to
>
> > try and help with that effort. I will take a look at your repository
>
> > at some point during the next few days.
>
> > Would you expect this to work under 64 bit versions of Windows, or are
>
> > the other comments about this still relevant? I must say I'm a bit
>
> > confused that some replies, like that from Christian suggest that it
>
> > should just work under the right Windows, whereas you're implying it
>
> > doesn't, presumably at least partly because the various needed
>
> > repositories are out of sync with the instructions.
>
> > Have I understood correctly.
>
> >
>
> > Thanks,
>
> >
>
> > Gary
>
> Hi Gary,
>
> I wouldn't say my work is solving "the" problem. And I didn't mean to 
> suggest that building on Windows currently is not working right. I 
> meant to convey it's more difficult than it should be. I presume just 
> like Christian and Derek that the biggest hurdle is that the 
> documentation didn't keep up with changing external dependencies (eg, 
> which files to download from where to get started). I have a working 
> test setup myself on a Windows XP machine for example.
>
> Yet my observation was that it is currently more complicated than 
> needed to build gnucash from scratch on Windows and I'm looking at 
> various things that can be done to improve this.
>
> One is to make bootstrapping as easy as possible. Requiring lots of 
> manual steps only to start will scare away interested people.
>
> Another issue is that we currently depend on a mingw configuration 
> that's fairly old. Mingw has restructured its downloads, so our 
> documentation has several stale links (as you have experienced yourself).
>
> Not to mention that a more recent mingw environment solves a number of 
> issues compared to the old one. It may introduce new issues as well, 
> so before really switching we obviously should run lots of tests.
>
> An example of an improvement in mingw is that it now comes with a 
> package manager. It has its limitations, but if used correctly it 
> simplifies our own dependency management for core dependencies, again 
> making development on Windows less challenging for newcomers.
>
> Specifically to your current difficulty to get things running on 
> Windows 7 64bit, it may be that the 64bit part is interfering. I don't 
> know because I don't have the environment to test it. It's true that 
> standard mingw is 32 bit only. On the other hand it may also be that 
> the current build system assumes permissions to do certain things it 
> actually no longer has on Windows 7. We will figure this all out as we 
> progress with the rewrite of the Windows build scripts.
>
> Geert
>
Hi Geert,
I've downloaded your repository and started trying to follow the 
instructions in the README in /packaging/win32
But I'm not getting very far....
1.  The location of MSYS needs to change  from:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/MSYS%20Base%20System/msys-1.0.11/MSYS-1.0.11.exe/download
to 
https://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/MSYS/Base/msys-core/msys-1.0.11/MSYS-1.0.11.exe
2. Similarly wget has moved slightly to: 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/Other/mingwPORT/Current%20Releases/

So I download these, install msys set up a minimal custom.sh and start msys
But it immediately complains ./install-impl.sh mingw-get: command not found
So should I install mingw as well? If so where to, or doesn't it matter?
I'm sure I can work it out, but if the intention is a click and forget 
install, there seems to be at least one step missing.
Or am I looking at the wrong instructions?
Thanks,
Gary