Re: GSoC Update: Wednesday (10th July)

[Michael Goffioul]

On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 9:36 AM, Anirudha Bose <address@hidden> wrote:

On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 5:34 AM, Michael Goffioul <address@hidden> wrote:

On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 2:26 PM, Anirudha Bose <address@hidden> wrote:

Hi Michael, and Patrick. I have blogged about my recent work on my blog [1]. Today I just spent some time working on the WXS file. Patrick, can you download the file and review it to see if it is working correctly? Note that you must do that from a Windows system. I also needed some help implementing the "choice for BLAS" feature.

Following the discussions in the mailing list, I am still not sure what to use to build the installer, NSIS or WiX. I am ready to do the task in whichever way seems the best to you. Since the end of first coding session is near, I would like to settle quickly with one framework and continue my work with it.

Plan for Thursday (11th July):

The amount of work I can do tomorrow can vary. So I am setting very basic goals.

- Work on resolving some warnings and errors while building the MSI which I had mentioned in my last update. Patrick, can you check if you get the same errors? I have resolved the critical ones, and the installer should work properly on all systems (not sure about Windows 9x).

- I have mentioned about two problems at the end of my blog post. I will probably work on them tomorrow. Any ideas?

I think the main question that you need to answer ASAP is whether we are still able to generate the installer from Linux and whether it can be completely automated (that is: starting from scratch, one should be able to run a single command that will compile everything and generate the installer, without any user interaction).

Can you look into that issue tomorrow?

I looked into this matter and it seems that one needs msitools to be installed (while cross-compiling) to do what you have mentioned above.

You're looking at it the wrong way. msitools is not a requirement, it should be added to MXE as part of the compilation process. At first glance, msitools depends on vala, so this means adding at least 2 packages to MXE. If we go the WiX way, I think it makes sense to use the same tools whether you're doing native or cross compiling; so msitools should also be used when doing native MinGW compilation.

 

I don't think this is possible using a simple script unlike NSIS because the process needs us to generate GUIDs for every component. We need a separate harvesting tool called wixl-heat to generate a basic WXS file from our Octave directory containing the compiled binaries.

wixl-heat is part of msitools, isn't it? So if msitools is added to MXE, you'll have all the tools you need. The point is that the whole process should be automated and should not require more on the host than a compiler, make and a decent shell. If you can do that with WiX, that's fine for me.

 

On the other hand, using NSIS eliminates the need to install any separate package since writing any NSI file doesn't need any external software. I also think NSIS is included in mxe-octave. Please suggest a single solution, else I am unable to proceed further.

I expect you to make an educated choice. I have experience with NSIS, but none with WiX. So from my biased point of view, I'd say to go with NSIS; but this is only because I know NSIS and feel more comfortable with it. You've been playing with WiX for the last few days, so now is time for you to make a decision, based on your experience. WiX is a valid choice if the build process can still be automated, but I would then base the build on msitools and integrate msitools in MXE.

Michael.