-SUMO package doesn't build on XP

[zooko]

According to NODA Kai's message of Jan 31: ​http://allmydata.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2010-January/003729.html

allmydata-tahoe-1.5.0-r4207-SUMO.tar.bz2 doesn't build on WinXP.
As in the log below, ssleay32.a is required but there's no such file.
A tarball without -SUMO happily builds, so there will be a difference
between pyOpenSSL within -SUMO package and one which is DLed during
building of non-SUMO package.
The same problem is observed with allmydata-tahoe-1.5.0-SUMO.tar.bz2.

> C:\allmydata-tahoe-1.5.0-r4207-SUMO>python.exe setup.py build
[snip]
> Searching for pyOpenSSL
> Best match: pyOpenSSL 0.9
> Processing pyopenssl-0.9.tar.gz
> Running pyOpenSSL-0.9\setup.py -q bdist_egg --dist-dir c:\docume~1\nodakai\locals~1\temp\easy_install-ck1hd4\pyOpenSSL-0.9\egg-dist-tmp-94xmz9
> error: Setup script exited with Cannot find ssleay32.a, aborting

The reason the non-SUMO build works is that setuptools detects the right binary pyOpenSSL package for the version of Python and Windows and downloads that. I don't immediately see how to make the SUMO build do the right thing, so I guess the solution is to document the SUMO build as requiring a pre-installed copy of OpenSSL and a compiler and include paths to build on Windows, or perhaps to document the SUMO build as requiring that you install pyOpenSSL yourself, or perhaps documenting the SUMO build as not supported on Windows.

Personally, I would rather kill the entire idea of a SUMO build. It is a support burden (it complicates the "how to install" process by offering another option, and the SUMO option may or may not work) and I personally don't value the feature of installing on a Desert Island enough to allocate my limited time to it. It certainly doesn't have tests that get automatically executed on Windows, or we wouldn't have used Kai as a human buildslave to discover that this problem existed.

I think part of what is going on is that our packaging needs are changing as Tahoe-LAFS is being integrated into distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, NixOS, and Gentoo. If you are planning to be stranded on a Desert Island and you want Tahoe-LAFS there, just install one of those operating systems on your laptop before your trip.

I'm assigning this to Brian since the SUMO build was his idea. Brian: please reply with either "fine, kill the SUMO build" or "no, don't". Thanks!

[davidsarah]

correcting Kai's name

[davidsarah]

I would suggest documenting the SUMO build as not supported on Windows. Maintaining the ability to do a Desert Island install is useful, but probably less so to Windows users.

[warner]

We've removed the SUMO build entirely, and docs/desert-island.rst has instructions for using pip's wheel cache to perform offline builds. So I'm closing this one.