[GNC-dev] Windows build issue

[Geert Janssens]

As mentioned on the aqbanking beta thread on gnucash-user there was an issue 
on our Windows nightly build server.

I'll add some more details here on gnucash-devel for posterity.

I made a package dependency change in the past weekend - I have added mingw-
swig and dropped msys-swig from the package list.

Unfortunately the main msys2 repository (repo.msys2.org) went offline at about 
the same time. This was already reported:
https://github.com/msys2/MSYS2-packages/issues/2171

Apparently they have server issues. The issue above has a link to their gitter 
logs suggesting the server did hang and didn't come online again after a 
reboot.

Due to this, our build scripts were unable to install the new swig package. As 
my changes assumed the new package to be installed our builds started failing.

msys2's pacman uses a mirror list, so the connection failures to 
repo.msys2.org would eventually lead to the second mirror in the list - 
sourceforge.

The issue above also recommends avoiding sourceforge as that package db is 
running behind. Unfortunately our nightly builds have been trying to access sf 
since the msys2 repo disappearance and it seems that resulted in some minor 
package db corruption on our build server. A normal pacman update would fail, 
complaining a libhtmlhelp.a was already present on the file system (a file 
normally installed by crt-git).

I have cleaned the package db, manually removed that file and reran pacman 
update. This time updates went fine.

Then I started setup-mingw64.ps1 again and that now properly installed the new 
swig package.

As I write this a new nightly build is running and passing the previous choke 
point.

Fingers crossed.

Geert