[tahoe-dev] seeking volunteer for an hour's labor Re: [tahoe-lafs] #773: run through installation on Windows

[Shawn Willden]

On Saturday 25 July 2009 03:53:11 pm Shawn Willden wrote:
> On Saturday 25 July 2009 01:02:00 pm Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn wrote:
> > Folks:
> >
> > Anybody out there who loves Windows?  Okay, how about this: anybody
> > out there who has a working Windows system and is willing to use it
> > for an hour or so to make sure Tahoe-LAFS installs cleanly?
>
> I'll fire up a clean XP VM and give it a try. This has been on my to-do
> list for a while anyway.

Okay, here's what I did:

0.  Installed a clean Windows XP system in a VMWare virtual machine.

1.  Went to http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/docs/install.html.  BTW, 
that page looks horrible on IE6.  Huge type.

2.  It said I need Python, so I followed the link, found the latest 2.5 on the 
list (2.5.4), clicked through and downloaded the MSI.  Took all the defaults.

3.  Back to the instructions.  The link is to a 1.4 zip file.  Couldn't find a 
1.5 zip file.  Got a clean checkout with darcs, removed the _darcs directory, 
zipped it up and copied it over to Windows.

4.  Back to the instructions.  Unpacked the zip into c:\tahoe

5.  Opened a cmd.exe window.  Went to c:\tahoe and ran "python setup.py 
build".  Got "'python' is not recognized as an internal or external command, 
operable program or batch file."   Changed it to "c:\Python25\python setup.py 
build".  It ran for a while, then failed with "ImportError: No module named 
win32api".

6.  Back to the instructions.  Noticed the bit at the bottom with a link to 
the InstallDetails wiki page.  Noticed it said I needed pywin32.

7.  Downloaded and installed pywin32-214.win32-py2.5.exe, then ran the build 
again.  This time it finished with the error "Python was built with Visual 
Studio version 7.1 and extensions need to be build with the same version of 
the compiler, but it isn't installed."  It was trying to build zfec-1.4.5.

8.  Based on the mention of mingw in Michael Walsh's error message, downloaded 
the mingw installer.  One interesting problem was that IE6 crashed every time 
I tried to download.  Installed FF to work around that.  Did a full install 
of mingw.

9.  Re-ran build, with "-c mingw32", but got the same compiler version error.

At this point, it looks like my only option is to (a) install cygwin, (b) get 
python2.5 sources, (c) get python-mingw, (d) build python with mingw and then 
(e) retry with the mingw-built python.

How does this work on the Windows buildslaves?  Are they using a mingw-build 
python?

	Shawn.