Oolite Bulletins

Hi,

I think we should add the files used to create the windows installer to svn so people other than Nic can create an installer if they desire.

I see the autopackage stuff is in a directory at the top level. Would you be happy enough with a similar thing for the windows installer, say a directory called "wininst" that contains the necessary files and a shell script in the tools directory to actually make the installer exe?

dajt wrote:

I think we should add the files used to create the windows installer to svn so people other than Nic can create an installer if they desire.

I'd be in favour of this. I've been itching to contribute since way back, but been having the same problems as dajt with GNUstep configurations and so on.

The normal methods:

Put dependencies in the 'deps' directory - to be consistent with the other SDL releases, precompiled dependencies should be in deps/Windows-x86-deps. How this is internally structured is whatever works best for creating the installer, but I suggest looking at the Linux-x86-deps directory to get an idea. (Why the x86? Well, Windows is vaguely cross architecture, also supporting amd64, so there may in future be a need for Windows-x86_64-deps directory). The 'Windows' bit ideally should be whatever 'uname' on Windows+MinGW returns. This way there's even a fighting chance that the existing tools/mknightly shell script might even do something useful.

Tools for building the Windows build should be in 'tools'. (Scripts, batch files etc.)

Putting a 'WindowsInstaller' directory at the top level is OK. The main aim is to keep the top level as uncluttered as possible so newcomers can find things like the README file, the Xcode project and the GNUmakefile.

I would also suggest making a separate (out of tree) installer for a development environment - which installs a GNUstep + SDL environment on top of MinGW so people can get started with it easily (in the Linux world we are fortunate that all the development tools are just an 'apt-get' or 'yum install' away, so there's no need to bother with that bit).

Yes, the deps will have to be marked as win32 currently, because I assume everything would have to be rebuilt for 64 bit OSs.

I don't see a need for a dev env installer - the wiki has the links required and you just choose the defaults for both svn and GNUstep.

The reason I don't want to go down that road is I don't know if there are registry entries required etc. Much safer to just install these things from the existing installers.

I'll check the installer stuff in tomorrow.