Call for testing: hackable Mercurial for Windows

[Adrian Buehlmann]

On 2011-10-21 00:53, Angel Ezquerra wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 21, 2011 at 12:23 AM, Adrian Buehlmann <adrian at cadifra.com> wrote:
>> On 2011-10-21 00:00, David Golub wrote:
>>> I've been building Mercurial with TortoiseHg on Windows in order to do
>>> TortoiseHg development, and it's been fairly simple.  You just need install
>>> Python (either 32-bit or 64-bit, depending on what you want) along with the
>>> Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 3.5.  It needs to be that exact
>>> version, not that version or later.  For TortoiseHg development, you need
>>> py2exe and pywin32, but I'm pretty sure that Mercurial alone can be built
>>> without these.  The one snag that I hit is that the SDK is missing the
>>> vcvarsall.bat file in the Visual Studio directory, so you need to write a
>>> batch file to call either vcvars32.bat or vcvars64.bat, depending on whether
>>> you want a 32-bit or 64-bit build.  Once that's in place, just check out the
>>> Mercurial source and run setup.py from a command prompt.  Everything should
>>> build without a problem.
>>>
>>> David Golub
>>
>> There's also my recipe for preparing a thg build machine
>>
>> https://bitbucket.org/tortoisehg/thg-winbuild/src/8dd6c556e433/README.txt#cl-134
>>
>> (We've told Angel a couple of times already ;-)
>>
> 
> Jajaja! :-)
> 
> I think Adrian's message is further proof that Matt's idea is great.
> Adrian has been very graciously trying to help me to setup my machine
> to be able to build mercurial on windows for ages. Yet I never really
> got round to do so. The main reason is that it is (was?) a complicated
> process. Every time I wanted to do it I would find some excuse to do
> something more fun, such as doing some actual coding on TortoiseHg or
> playing with my kid! :-)
> 
> Hopefully now I won't ever need to go through that process, which
> would mean that my laziness has finally paid off, as it usually does
> ;-)
> 
> BTW, I want to thank Adrian again for trying to help me with this so many times!

Look: Your stated goal was always to being able to hack on *thg*, and
for that, the requirements are a tiny little bit higer.

I'm pretty sure I gave you detailed steps multiple times, but you
apparently never were interested deeply enough to try them.

For people who don't care about thg, the approach proposed by Matt might
actually be useful. I haven't tried it. Kudos to Matt for providing it.

In my personal experience, MinGW is just a toy compiler which I won't
bother to look at again for production code (despite its sexy license).

The MS C/C++ compiler is the full fledged one which you will get when
using my recipe (only the few first steps are needed). Free of charge.
No Visual Studio install or anything like that needed. Only the SDK.

But now, we are getting off topic, so I'll stop right here.