Talk:Windows

Errors using automated Windows build script

Hi everyone. I spent some of the Thanksgiving weekend trying to build GNUCash in Windows. Everything proceeded fairly well until I got to the autotools section of the build, at which point I got a vague error about requiring m4 version 1.4 or later. I checked, and the msys environment provided m4 version 1.4. I played around a little more, and finally went so far as to comment out the version check in the build script (I think it was autoconf/bin/autom4te) and that allowed the build to run a little further before it ran into another error (still in autoconf). I don't remember what the second one was, but the common thread in both cases was a reference to /dev/null. I don't know how msys handles /dev/null (there isn't a /dev directory in the environment), but Perl didn't seem real happy with it (I was able to do some testing at the command line to show that at least the shell doesn't throw an error when referencing /dev/null). I was wondering if anyone has successfully run the automated build recently? I tried to follow the directions on this page as closely as possible (did change mingw from 5.0.3 to 5.1.0 -- I had problems downloading and installing 5.0.3), but I'm assuming I did something wrong... Oh, and yes, I do have a reasonable amount of Linux experience, so feel free to get technical. --Scbash 09:13, 27 November 2006 (EST)

I haven't seen this kind of error recently. As usual, copying the exact error message would be much more helpful - just mark the text in the msys window and press "Paste" in any other Windows window.

I don't think you should comment out any of the checks. Also, /dev/null is not a problem in the msys shell and it will be interpreted correctly similar to what we expected on the Linux side. I'd rather guess you got some version mixup, i.e. the m4 that was found during that check might have been a different one than should've been found. --Cstim 09:29, 27 November 2006 (EST)

I didn't feel all that good about changing the build either, but I wanted to see what might happen. I'll try to do a clean run tonight and get the exact error. Thanks. --Scbash 10:46, 27 November 2006 (EST)