Building on Windows from scratch - guile problem SOLVED

[Geert Janssens]

On Thursday 16 January 2014 15:06:55 Gary Bilkus wrote:
> On 16/01/2014 13:26, Geert Janssens wrote:
> > Gary,
> > 
> > While looking at your changes I noticed you changed two lines in the
> > vbs script.
> > 
> > One is that you added my repository/branch in a comment. That's ok
> > and makes it easier for others to start.
> > 
> > The second is to install msys-patch. Is there a reason you do this
> > in
> > the vbs script and not in install-impl.sh ?
> > 
> > Geert
> 
> Hi Geert.
> The reason I added in msys-patch to my version of your script is so
> that the instructions I posted on the wiki would work, since they
> tell you to run your vbs script and then run patch against the 2.6
> repo with my patchfile, and that doesn't work if you don't yet have
> patch installed.
> 
> Of course, as and when there's a git repo with the patches already
> incorporated, that step is no longer needed and nor is patch. But it
> doesn't do much harm to leave it around, and would make it easier for
> people who have to play catch-up the next time a downstream dependency
> gets broken.
> Gary

Hi Gary,

That makes sense.

The reason I'm very cautious about adding stuff in the bootstrap script is that mingw-get is 
fairly fragile. The bootstrap script unconditionally installs the most recent version of the various 
packages, but in the install.sh script we force specific versions. If at some point the most recent 
version is more recent than what we explicitly set this will probably cause mingw-get to error 
out. That may or may not be bad but at least pretty confusing to new users.

We may fix this by installing very specific versions in the bootstrap script already instead of the 
latest available. Although that approach risks that these versions will at some point get out of 
sync with the versions defined in defaults.sh. But IMO that is less of an issue. If this happens the 
installation script will update the packages to the proper versions without errors the first time it 
runs.

I'll admit this is close to nitpicking. There are bigger issues to solve right now, but I mention it 
because now I noticed it. I will probably forget later on.

Geert