Re: [Bug-gnubg] GNUBG windows compilation guide

[Philippe Michel]

On Wed, Apr 03, 2019 at 02:27:26PM +0200, Wolf Dieter Wall wrote:

> I would like to recompile gnubg on windows.
> I read somewhere in the docs that there is a "Nardy Pillard instructions
> for compiling gnubg" that contains instructions.
> 
> Unfortunately the link is dead.
> 
> Do you have a copy of the guide or sime hint on compiling on windows?

What you mention might be this :
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnubg/2003-08/msg00332.html
but it is so old to be of no practical value.

More up to date instructions are there : 
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnubg/2011-08/msg00047.html
but they are not very detailed and somewhat out of date as well (they 
mention downloading separate libraries but all this is available as 
packages in modern msys/mingw).


As far as the "official" installer is built, there are three stages :

- build something that works in an msys2 (https://www.msys2.org/) 
environment. This is essentially what Michael Petch describes in the 
message linked above but has become simpler with modern msys. This is 
very similar to how you would do on Linux (especially Arch Linux since 
msys2 uses the same packages management system).

- create a subtree with the GNUbg built above and the parts of msys2 
that are needed to have something that can run autonomously, that you 
could archive and install on other computers without msys. You can do 
this on your own with some trials and errors but detailed instructions or 
a script that does the work will save time.

You can probably stop there for most use cases, but it is possible to :

- create an installer usable with Windows software management that takes 
the above subtree and does a few more things like installing and 
uninstalling it the usual way, creating menu entries or desktop icons 
etc... For this we use Inno Setup and Michael has uploaded the needed 
configuration files on gnubg.org's server.


I currently only have partial notes, not usable instructions, for all the 
above, but since I am going to setup a clean environment to build gnubg 
with python3 in the coming weeks, I'll try to document this in a more 
thorough way for at least the first two parts and publish it here.