[Enigma-devel] TLA on windows

[Tacvek]

The following is a long story about my adventures of checking out Enigma on 
windows. I believe it may be necessary to rethink the use of Arch, despite 
it being technologically superior. (As you will find out by reading below 
arch does not come anywhere near the quality of the other GNU software, and 
IMHO it disgraces the name of GNU.)

Trying to use windows to compile the latest enigma is a nightmare. Cygwin 
has no TLA. I download the source, but Tom Lord is an idiot and uses 
hand-crafted configures and makefiles for everything, rather than using 
autoconf, so it is effectively impossible to compile under Cygwin.

I finally find a binary, and it works, sort of.

I go to check out the archive and discover that TLA is VERY slow under 
Windows, it takes 15 minutes to check out Enigma. But Enigma refuses to 
check out all the way anyway. Apparently TLA's version of patch (the Cygwin 
port of TLA requires it to have its own special port of the diffutils) 
throws a fit when it attempts to patch some of the Esprit levels. There is 
no apparent reason for it.

Hoping to speed things up a bit I download the entire Enigma Arch archive to 
a directory on my computer, and point TLA to it. (I know I did this properly 
because TLA at first threw a fit because my-id did not match dheck's, but 
that was easy to fix.).

Then (still not knowing the cause of the errors at this point) I go to check 
it out from the local archive. It did not increase speed much, perhaps a 
total of 4 minutes faster. But, I still get the error.

So I create a pristine check out to the patch before the error occurs, and 
then use `TLA replay' to discover the files causing the error. I manually 
apply the patches.

All is then good, because I have a clean checkout of enigma.

Except for one large problem: just about all of TLA commands cause TLA to 
create a pristine copy of the tree in a temporary directory, and then use 
it. The problem is that TLA is unable to create a pristine copy due to the 
patching problems.

And even if those problems did not exist even creating a patch relative to 
the current development branch would take TLA **20 minutes**!!!!

Therefore I cannot recommend the use of arch. It is just not quality 
software.

Tacvek