README.w32

[ghazel]

As discovered at the hack-a-thon, zfec requies c99 and MS never plans to support c99. This patch (should) make zfec c89 compliant without any significant change in runtime or memory behevaiour (yay alloca).

You should probably run unittests if you have any. I was able to compile and run tahoe just fine, but that is by no means a full test.

[ghazel]

c89 diff

[zooko]

Thank you for the patch! I'll accept it into the source code immediately, but there are a few other things we should do:

1. Can you give me a reference for Microsoft's position on C99? (That still makes me sad. I think C99 is nice.) Anyway, I'd like to have a link to Microsoft's statement on it to reference in the future. Also, I suppose, if their stated reason is "lack of requests from customers", then I guess I could as a paying customer of Microsoft developer tools request that they add C99 support.

2. We could use a Windows buildslave, see ​http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/7#comment:17

3. Somebody should update the README and the README.w32 to explain how you can, in fact, build tahoe with the Microsoft tools.

Thanks!

[zooko]

We now have e-mail from trac working, so ghazel will hopefully receive an e-mail note.

[zooko]

Mike Booker has agreed to do #3 -- update the READMEs to explain how to build with Microsoft tools. Mike -- is that right? You are going to do this?

[zooko]

My second request -- a Windows buildslave -- has been satisfied. Although note that this is a Windows buildslave which uses cygwin build tools. There is an open ticket to create a Windows buildslave that uses Microsoft build tools: #230.

My first request -- a link to Microsoft's official position on supporting C99 -- remains unresolved. I would like to be able to write an effective mail saying "I am a Microsoft customer, and I request this feature.", and to facilitate other people who want C99 support to do the same.

Mike is working on the third request -- updating the README.w32. (Possibly he will even create a README.w32.VisualStudio so that people who are going to do the all-cygwin way and the cygwin-tools-to-build-native-objects way can have their own path through the instructions.)

[zooko]

I'm going to update our docs to explain that building with Microsoft tools is currently not supported because of pyOpenSSL.

[zooko]

RobK made some good updates to [docs:README.win32] yesterday. It needs a lot more work (structure -- separating cygwin from Windows-native, probably, and perhaps HTML-formatting), but I'm bumping this ticket out of 0.7.0 now.

[zooko]

Documenting our build process is one of those things that isn't actually a requirement for the Allmydata 3.0 product, but which we should not put off, so I'm putting this ticket into 0.8.0.

[zooko]

Assigning to RobK. Rob: feel free to bump it to a future Milestone, close it, etc. as appropriate.

[zooko]

also fix up (or kill) docs/install-details.html

[zooko]

For the moment I have removed README.win32 and docs/install-detailed.html from the source tree and I'm bumping this issue to 1.1.1. Actually I'm closing this as a duplicate of #282 (more detailed and targeted docs about installing from source).