Building on Windows from scratch

[Gary Bilkus]

On 07/01/2014 13:52, Gary Bilkus wrote:
> On 28/12/2013 08:16, Gary Bilkus wrote:
>> Thanks Geert,
>> I've got a bit further....the program now starts and then dies after 
>> showing a splash screen.
>> I found a gnucash-launcher.cmd script which didn't quite work, 
>> because it was missing references to libxslt enchant and libsoup
>> If I add those ( bin and lib ) to the path, the program no longer 
>> complains, but dies almost immediately.
>> If I run inside gdb, it seems to be failing somewhere in guile 
>> initialization which causes the program to exit.
>>
>> I've also set up an XP VM and run on there under 32 bits, just to see 
>> what happens. Same thing - it will compile OK, and dies at the same 
>> point.
>> My next stage will be to recompile guile and leave the tmp directory 
>> around, so that gdb has source to work from, and see if a detailed 
>> debug session shows up the problem. Unless you have a better idea!
>> Gary
>>
>
> I've made some more progress on my attempts to compile gnucash on 
> Windows from scratch.
> Firstly, I've tried running everything on a 32 bit VM, and there's no 
> real difference. Some of the compiler warnings go away, but the other 
> problems remain.
>
> So I did some debugging, and discovered that the first reason gnucash 
> bombs out is that the guile dll names for libguile-srfi-srfi... in 
> guile/bin are inconsistent with the names of the files being loaded by 
> the corresponding scm file. I think this is because the versioning of 
> libraries under unix assumes that the minor version is linked to the 
> major version, but that hasn't happened under windows.
> So I copied, for example libguile-srfi-srfi-1-v-3-3.dll to 
> libguile-srfi-srfi-1-v-3-3.dll which seems to have fixed that problem.
> I now get some debug output in the gnucash.trace...log files saying
> ...Could not locate module gnucash/app-utils interface v.0
> ............register/ledger-core ...register/register-gnome...........
> for loads of the modules gnucash loads on start. So it bombs out there.
>
> When I have a look in the guile-modules directory, I can see some of 
> these, but nothing in the register subdirectory for example.
> Any ideas? It seems so close now.
>
> BTW, I've also tried building the newly released 2.6.0. It behaves 
> identically up to this point, so from now on I will concentrate on 
> trying to build 2.6 after first running Geerts install processes to 
> create the necessary environment
>
> Gary
>

UPDATE......The problem with the modules appears to be a slight 
red-herring to do with having 2.6 around.If I build what seems to be 
2.5.something based on the git repository from geert, with all the 
changes I've mentioned, I can now get gnucash to compile and run ( at 
least as far as letting me see an account list - i haven't tested 
further ).However, if I try to build 2.6 from the distributed source, I 
get the module location problems above and it bombs out.

For some reason, the 2.5 version seems to take ages ( almost a minute ) 
to load the qif guile module.
I shall run some tests to confirm the program is really working and let 
people know.

It would obviously be useful to capture what I've learned in a more 
structured way than having people read the entire thread. Should I 
update the wiki article on building from Windows? Can I safely point 
that article to geerts repository at least for the time being?

Gary