[M3devel] M3 concerns / Windows problems

[Olaf Wagner]

Quoting Randy Coleburn <rcoleburn at scires.com>:

> I'll try to find time again this weekend to do a build of cm3 on
> Windows XP again.

That would be great.

> 3.  Get Jay's d5.5.0 min Win32 and use it to build the current sources
> from CVS.
I'd choose this one.

> I know that there are some scripts that have been built to help in
> building things.  One thing that would be helpful I think is to have a
> text file that lists the correct build sequence order for all
> packages in the repository.  I know that some packages may not build on
> every platform, but if we keep this text file up-to-date, it would help
> folks as they work on scripts, etc.

The file that lists all packages in order is scripts/def-std-pkgs.sh,
though some may be missing from it. It's in Bourne shell format though.

A compiler bootstrap may need another more complex order, where
some packages are compiled twice at least though. The upgrade process
should be automated in  scripts/upgrade.sh (for most scenarios).
This is due to subtle dependencies between the compiler and the
runtime libraries.

> Also, I seem to recall that in the past that for some of the core
> packages, you had to build these twice in the process of getting
> everything up and running.  Again, these facts need to be made very
> obvious so folks don't go down a wrong path.
As explained above...

> Once I get started on a path (1..4 above), I also need to know which of
> the current scripts to use in building on Windows XP to get the best
> results.

You should be able to use all, though for the shell scripts you need
a POSIX environment (like Cygwin), for the Python scripts you
obviously need a Python installation (and they are quiet new, I don't
know about their status); easiest will probably be Jay's CMD scripts
for Windows. So I think upgrade,cmd would be a good start, followed
probably by do-cm3-std.cmd.

> I love the language and have been a zealous proponent of it for a long
> time, but we've got to make it easier for folks to get started with
> Modula-3.  I will carefully document the steps I take in getting the
> system built on Windows so we can make this available to everyone.

I second this.

> The last time I was able to get the sources and build on Windows was
> v5.26.  That version didn't work correctly with some of my programs and
> I reported the problems to Olaf et al.  The last time I checked out the
> sources and tried to build 5.40, I wound up with compiler errors.  I
> recall some of these were related to LONGINT and some were related to
> the garbage collector.  So yes, there was a situation where I checked
> out sources that represented a "broken" version in that it would not
> build.

I think that the head of the tree is quiet often broken wrt.
a simple compilation of all packages, and sometimes even broken
wrt. to the standard compiler upgrade procedure. This is really
difficult to foresee for many commits, if they concern the runtime
and/or compiler extensions. It's the main reason why I think we need
automated regression tests on as many platforms as possible.

> The package status page at
> http://modula3.elegosoft.com/cm3/package-status.html is headed up by
> the title CM3 v5.1.  Is this page up-to-date?  It would be helpful to
> know where we stand wrt each package on each supported platform relative
> to the current source tree.  Again, I think an automated scoreboard
> could make this possible.

No, the package status hasn't been updated for a long time.
There are lots of things that would need updating. Volunteers are
welcome.

Once we've got automated tests, this page could be generated, too.

> Sorry to ramble on so much in this post.  My main interest is in
> getting the current sources built and running on Windows XP.  As soon as
> I am successful, I will run tests using my code base.  I have a number
> of programs that were built using cm3 v4.1 that are still in use.  These
> use a lot of features, including pickles, netobj, trestle, etc.  So, my
> tests should help uncover Broken #2 problems on Windows.

IIRC, the main problems we at Elego had with Windows years ago were
mostly GUI-related; the base stuff was working well. Unfortunately,
there was noone with Windows GUI programming experience at that time :-(

> Finally, once I get a working cm3 system on Windows, I'll provide the
> new cm3-IDE (aka Reactor) package.

This will be great and long-awaited indeed.

I hope you succeed,

Olaf
-- 
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