On 12 Feb 2007, at 12:29, Christopher Armstrong wrote:
Hi
On Sun, 11 Feb 2007 14:51:39 -0800, "Alex Perez"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
said:
Lastly, on a slightly unrelated note, the GNU dependencies (zlib,
libpng, libjpeg, etc) that are needed to compile GNUstep on
Windows can
be automated using an installer from the gnuwin32.sf.net project
which
downloads most of the precompiled GNU environment. I was thinking
that
it may be possible to take the scripts given there, combine them
with
scripts for installing mingw/msys and create an installable mingw
environment on Windows that is ready to compile source code within.
Yes, that would be a great thing to have available to the
community :)
I've thought about doing exactly this many times myself, but
unfortunately do not have the time. Are you volunteering? If not,
would
anyone else like to volunteer? If we don't get any responses,
perhaps it
would be wise to trim this particular subthread down and forward
it to
gnustep-discuss to see if there are any willing volunteers.
Whilst I would love to volunteer to do this I'm really pressed for
time
at the moment, and when university resumes I will be even more pressed
for time, so much so that I am unable to do any serious work on
GNUstep.
Please feel free to forward the idea to the gnustep-discuss list
and see
if anyone's up for it. From what I can work out, it could be done
with a
series of batch files and an installer programme. The gnuwin32 project
actually includes some utilities like sed, grep and wget in its
installer to locate and download all the latest versions of the
binaries. MINGW currently uses a binary installer which is likely
to be
a InstallShield style install-programme builder kind of thing.
Someone (a few weeks ago) suggested using WiX ... apparently the
windows standard installer stuff. I had a look at it and it seems to
have the advantage of being xml data fie driven, so might be
relatively easy to automate. I haven't actually had time to try it
though.
It would be nice to use the most 'standard' windows mechanism we can
(unless it's unbearably awful).
Maybe the gnuwin32 project wraps WiX? Maybe it does something
similar but better?
Anyway, I'd really love to see three things for windows.
1. an installer that installs all the required binaries and gnustep
core (and something to automatically rebuild this installer)
2. an installer that installs the mingw development tools and all our
headers etc (and something to automatically rebuild it)
3. an extension to gnustep-make to generate installer packages for
anything we build with gnustep-make.
So a developer would install (2), which would automatically install
(1) as well
They would build their application and then do something like 'make
windowspkg' ... generating an installer package for their application
A user would download the application installer package and run it,
and it would install (1) and the application
I don't know if WiX and similar installer systems are able to
automatically download and install dependencies ... if not, it might
be worth looking for something which does support that capability.
There are few things more irritating than getting part way through an
installation and finding out that you need to locate and download
something else, then doing that and finding out that it depends on
yet another thing ...
However, even if we can't automate download/install of dependencies,
it would still be great to have something built into the gnustep core
to generate windows installer packages.
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