Re: msvc and vista fun

Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> 
> I am still very unhappy about the way the MSVC builds work. Although we
> have managed to make it sort of work with the buildfarm script, it is
> distinctly fragile. Last night, for example, I had a build failure due
> to a badly installed zlib. The error state didn't come back to the
> buildfarm script, which carried on merrily to the check stage, which
> also naturally failed, but also didn't manage to give back an error

I've heard you report this before, and I've tried and failed many times
to reproduce it. It has *always* come back with the proper errorlevel
when I've tried. So two questions:

1) are you absolutely sure that the problem is not in the buildfarm script?

2) What exactly was the error? So I can try to reproduce that exact
problem here and see if I can find out what it is. What did you do
wrong, and what was the error messages if you still have the log.


> state to the buildfarm script, and finally got a failure at the install
> stage. That means that we simply can't rely on this build system to give
> us accurate state on the buildfarm - we might have had a code breakage
> but it won't always tell us that.

At least it broke eventually :-) But I agree that's a big problem.


> Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that this build system is a
> hodge-podge of Perl programs and Windows shell scripts. In at least one
> case we call perl to write a dynamically generated .bat file which we
> then execute. 

Which one is that? I can't find it. A simple findstr through all the
perl files appears to contain nothing of the sort.

> Since the perl is pretty much indispensable (or at least
> would need replacing by an engine of similar capability), I think we
> should make the whole thing a perl suite with some very minimal .bat
> wrappers if necessary.

That's mostly how it is now, no? What are you referring to specifically?

The only longer ones I can see are:

builddoc.bat - could certainly be put into perl stuff, but it's not
involved in the buildfarm process, so...

clean.bat - doesn't really matter, IMO, and again not involved in the
buildfarm process

vcregress.bat - sure, it could be made perl, but right now you can
actually run the regression tests on an installed system without having
perl at all... But that's not really a requirement, so we could change
that one.

The rest are just thin wrappers.


Speaking of wrappers, are you planning to make the buildfarm use the
modules instead of the perlscripts? IIRC, I made those modules
specifically for the bf - and it should make it even easier to pick up
the errors from there.


I'll leave the Vista parts to Dave since I haven't used it at all there.
These are really completely separate issues, and should be treated as such.

//Magnus