Re: gnustep-make experiment

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 12 Feb 2007, at 12:29, Christopher Armstrong wrote:

> Hi
>
> On Sun, 11 Feb 2007 14:51:39 -0800, "Alex Perez"  
> <address@hidden>
> 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.