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

Sun Jul 26 06:53:40 PDT 2009

On Saturday,2009-07-25, at 23:22 , Shawn Willden wrote:

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

Uh, well, the page doesn't have any style sheet or other style  
indicators.  It just says "<html><head><h1>About Tahoe</h1>...".

> 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.

Good.

> 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.

Oh, if you get a chance to do something like this again soon, please  
get a recent snapshot from http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/ 
snapshots/ .

> 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".

Hm, so installing Python didn't add that directory to your path.

> 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.

Okay I've updated install.html to mention pywin32 earlier.

> 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.

Okay, so now there are two layers of how to improve things here.  On  
the lower layer, I want to make it easier and better-documented for  
people to build the packages such as zfec and pycryptopp which  
require a C/C++ compiler.

On the upper layer, we are supposed to be providing binary packages  
(eggs) of those dependencies, at least on Windows, so that people  
installing Tahoe-LAFS, which is pure Python, do not require a C/C++  
compiler.

So why isn't *that* layer currently working?  The _auto_deps.py file  
[1] says that Tahoe-LAFS requires zfec >= 1.1.0.  The setup.cfg file  
[2] says that the build process should look at a certain directory on  
http://allmydata.org named "tahoe-dep-eggs" [3].  That directory  
contains a file named "zfec-1.4.4-py2.5-win32.egg".  When you did the  
build step you described above -- your step 7 -- it should not have  
attempted to compile zfec from source!  Could you inspect the stdout  
from the build process to see if it considered directory [3] and if  
it considered downloading "zfec-1.4.4-py2.5-win32.egg"?

Oh!  It is because you're building v1.4.1 and the setup.cfg of that  
version [4] does not say to look at the "tahoe-dep-eggs" dir [3].   
Good, so that mystery is explained.  If you try again, then the  
"upper layer" of pre-built binaries of the dependencies should work  
with a recent pre-1.5 snapshot.

Regards,

Zooko

[1] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/_auto_deps.py
[2] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/setup.cfg
[3] http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-dep-eggs/
[4] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/browser/setup.cfg? 
rev=20090414025636-92b7f-e77128b954ced21ebd04d82c615ee0f8f9cffd49