[tahoe-dev] Windows support for v1.7.1

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

Samuel Neves (Dcoder) asked me on IRC what's the status of Windows
improvements for v1.7.1 (due to be released this coming Saturday!).

I replied something like this:

<zooko> Let's see...
<zooko> We have three buildslaves which are often off-line.
	http://tahoe-lafs.org/buildbot/waterfall?builder=FreeStorm+WinXP-x86+py2.6&builder=Soultcer+Win7-64+py2.6&builder=Dcoder+Win7-64+py2.6
<zooko> soultcer: could you turn on your windows buildslave?
<zooko> http://tahoe-lafs.org/buildbot-pycryptopp/waterfall
<zooko> http://tahoe-lafs.org/buildbot-zfec/waterfall
<zooko> Other facts: we (probably!?) don't have binary .egg's of all of the
	binary dependencies for all windows variants whose version numbers are
	>= the highest publicly posted version number of the source package.
<zooko> That's important because the build system will try to build a source
	package if the source package is > the binary package's version
	number, and therefore the build will fail if the user doesn't have a
	working compiler.
<zooko> Look here to follow the build system's path:
<zooko> 1. http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/browser/trunk/_auto_deps.py
<zooko> and 1b. http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/browser/trunk/setup.cfg
<zooko> which has a "find_links" that leads you to
<zooko> 2. http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/
<Dcoder> so besides zfec and pycryptopp
<Dcoder> there is pyopenssl and pycrypto
<Dcoder> any other?
<zooko> Next fact, Soultcer's buildslave is (if I recall correctly) configured
	with no compiler, so it is a good test case for the "can a user with
	no compiler install Tahoe-LAFS?" question.
<zooko> soultcer: is that right?
<zooko> pywin32, but that can't be installed automatically by setuptools (last
	I checked).
<zooko> I think that's it.
<zooko> I think pyasn1 is a pure-Python distribution.
<zooko> Oh, you know what, there's Twisted.
<zooko> Twisted doesn't *actually* require a binary, but it will try to build
	a binary speed-up when it gets built and I believe it will cause the
	build to fail if there's no compiler.
<zooko> Here's my bug report about that to Twisted:
	http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/3586
<zooko> Other facts about Windows: David-Sarah has written a patch to
	eliminate the .exe entirely and to handle unicode args and stdout
	correctly.
<zooko> I tried to review this patch and ended up marking it as "more docs
	needed" because I didn't understand it.
<Dcoder> I see
<zooko> Reviewing that patch may well be the highest priority thing to do
	(aside from getting the buildslaves on-line)
<zooko> because we would like to have some time to manually test it out in
	trunk after committing it instead of committing it at the last moment
	before release. :-)
<Dcoder> should i build pypoenssl/pycrypto from latest release or from svn?
<zooko> Dcoder: latest release.
<zooko> Hm, unless the latest release of pycrypto has known problems. :-P
<zooko> It has on FreeBSD and Solaris. I don't recall any on Windows.
<Dcoder> what kind of problems?
<Dcoder> hm, apparently the win64 versions of py{crypto,openssl) in
	 http://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/deps/tahoe-lafs-dep-eggs/ are
	 already teh latest
<zooko> Sorry for spamminess, but here are a few tickets you should probably
	be aware of:
<zooko> http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1065# provide binary eggs
	of PyCrypto for our supported platforms
<zooko> http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1073# runner can't
	execute python executable on Win7-64bit
<zooko> http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1031# support Win64
<zooko> http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1015# needs doc: attempts
	to build from source of dependencies such as pycryptopp and pyOpenSSL
<zooko> http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/953# dependency on
	pycrypto needs to be tested and supported