[tahoe-dev] [tahoe-lafs] #773: run through installation on Windows

[tahoe-lafs]

#773: run through installation on Windows
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 Reporter:  zooko      |           Owner:  somebody
     Type:  task       |          Status:  new     
 Priority:  major      |       Milestone:  1.5.0   
Component:  packaging  |         Version:  1.4.1   
 Keywords:  win32      |   Launchpad_bug:          
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Comment(by zooko):

 > Even better (for Windows) is to get a working py2exe installer that
 "Just Works", of course.

 I hope that these are complementary, not alternative, i.e. I hope that we
 have a well-tested and documented process of building from source
 including building dependencies from source (layer 1), as well as a good
 process of building Tahoe-LAFS from source including installing binary
 dependencies (layer 2) (this one can be much easier than layer 1 -- no C
 compiling required!), as well as a prebuilt py2exe or bbfreeze installer
 for Windows (layer 3).

 I don't want the existence of the higher layers to mean we allow the lower
 layers to rot, for example, if people could easily build Tahoe-LAFS by
 pulling in binary dependencies, but nobody knew how to build the
 dependencies from source.  This was actually the case at one point in the
 past -- Tahoe-LAFS required pyOpenSSL but nobody -- literally nobody that
 I was able to find -- knew how to build pyOpenSSL from source for Windows.
 We had to rely on downloading a prebuilt pyOpenSSL binary from this one
 web site where it had, as far as we could tell, been abandoned by whoever
 originally compiled it.

 I'm glad that's not the case anymore!

 Anyway, until my wish is fulfilled
 (http://bugs.python.org/setuptools/issue83  ), I think a reasonable policy
 for layer 2 is that we don't upload sdists of dependencies without also
 uploading accompanying bdists, at least for Windows and probably also Mac.
 I've already automated most of this for pycryptopp (using Brian's
 excellent new {{{flappserver}}} tool, plus his excellent old
 {{{buildbot}}} tool), and I guess I'll proceed to do similar automation
 for zfec next...

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/773#comment:11>
tahoe-lafs <http://allmydata.org>
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