Building on Windows - status update

Wm Tarr wm.tarr at gmail.com
Fri May 9 12:18:19 EDT 2014


On 07/05/2014 15:36, Geert Janssens wrote:
> On Wednesday 07 May 2014 16:12:36 Geert Janssens wrote:
>>> Other thoughts: As things are changing fairly quickly at the moment 
>>> is the presumption in bootstrap_win_dev.vbs that I've got both 
>>> gnucash-on-windows.git gnucash.git a good sign that they don't need 
>>> to be updated? 
> I didn't answer this very clearly. The bootstrap script won't update 
> anything by itself. I will only set up a minimal environment to start 
> from. This install script on the other hand will update any dependency 
> that is not up to date anymore. It will however not update the sources 
> as that should be a user choice. The sources are in the two 
> directories above and I explained in my previous mail how they could 
> be updated. The idea behind this is that most people interested in 
> building gnucash themselves will do so to make changes or test 
> versions that are not available. In most of these cases the version to 
> start from should be determined by the user, not by the build system. 
> I would even be very disturbing if the build system decided on its own 
> to update the sources in this case. 

Agreed, I'd think most people wanting to try things from scratch would 
want "as standard as possible" a build to begin with.

> If you really want automatic updates you could run build_daily.sh in 
> the buildserver directory instead of install.sh/dist.sh. This script 
> is written to build the most recent version of gnucash completely 
> unattended at regular intervals and will include updating both 
> repositories. 
I'm no git wizard and this is for comment but given the accidental 
breaking that happened recently (this is *not* a finger pointing 
exercise) should the bootstrap be pulling from gnucash.git stable rather 
than master, perhaps?  (I'm not even sure I've got my git terms right!)  
My thought is that we shouldn't put people off trying.

>>> It isn't as though they are particularly large. At the moment I'm 
>>> grabbing gnucash-on-windows every time I build but leaving gnucash 
>>> alone as that will have changed less and it is the Win bit we're 
>>> playing with. Good practice or not? 
>> None of the recent changes would require a rerun of 
>> bootstrap_win_dev.vbs. There may be one change regarding html help 
>> but I haven't decided on this yet. There is also no need to grab the 
>> two repositories again. Instead you can use git to pull in the 
>> updates. You can do this as follows (example is for 
>> gnucash-on-windows.git but works the same way for gnucash.git): - 
>> Open a Windows Explorer - Right-click on the gnucash-on-windows.git 
>> directory - Select Git Bash. This will open a command prompt. - Enter 
>> one command: git pull - Close the command prompt again This should 
>> probably be added in the README file... 
> It is now :) 

It seems OK now but there were a few days when git pull from 
gnucash-on-windows.git was showing differences that I couldn't associate 
with changes I'd made to files.  I was taking the zip to be sure I had a 
consistent set of files and then (co-incidence happens) the build break 
occurred so I started again with gnucash.git and got muddled.

A lot of this is for interest / comment only.  I'm working through.  
What I don't want (I think this is general) is someone arriving late at 
the party and finding a bit momentarily broken. It can easily put 
someone off, who knows? your accounting love may be just one extra 
attempt away :)

-- 
Wm




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