Building beast under Windows

[Stefan Westerfeld]

   Hi!

In the last time, I've been working on an automatic python build script for
Beast on Windows. There are many build instructions out there for other free
software projects, which describe which packages to download, where to find
them, how to patch them, which options to pass to configure etc.

I wanted something which doesn't require interaction, so I wrote an automatic
script which compiles beast with all of its dependancies (*). To make things
even simpler, it also downloads the compiler and everything it needs to build
beast (MSys and Mingw). So you basically just need to download and run it, and
it will compile a working version of beast in C:\BEAST.

All necessary changes to the source code are made by applying suitable
patches which are supplied with beastbuild.

Here is the link where you can download beastbuild-0.1.0:

  http://space.twc.de/~stefan/beastbuild.php

What is working?
================
* Most of the GUI
* Loading the Demo Song
* Playing the Demo Song (set the latency settings for beast somewhat
  higher, if the standard setting doesn't sound all right)
* Plugins
* PortAudio driver

What is not working?
====================
* Scheme support
* Priority adjustment of the threads
* Browser integration (go to URL from Beast)
* Size optimization of the installed version of Beast (right now C:\beast
  contains Mingw, MSys, ActivePerl, and some of the stuff is compiled with
  -g)
* Relocatabilty (beast will not work unless installed in C:\beast)
* probably something I've forgotten

Note that this is an SVN snapshot build which already claims to be
0.7.2, so there are no guarantees whether the files produced by this
windows version of beast work on any other beast.

   Cu... Stefan

(*) something like this has been done many times, for instance KDE4
for windows, the FreeBSD ports approach, Gentoo's emerge, and many
others
--
Stefan Westerfeld, Hamburg/Germany, http://space.twc.de/~stefan
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[Tim Janik-4]

On Fri, 5 Jun 2009, Stefan Westerfeld wrote:

> What is not working?
> ====================
> * Scheme support
> * Priority adjustment of the threads
> * Browser integration (go to URL from Beast)

Isn't tihs something that should be fairly easily
doable given standard windows APIs? I'd expect google
to tunr up something quickly...

> * Size optimization of the installed version of Beast (right now C:\beast
>  contains Mingw, MSys, ActivePerl, and some of the stuff is compiled with
>  -g)
> * Relocatabilty (beast will not work unless installed in C:\beast)
> * probably something I've forgotten
>
> Note that this is an SVN snapshot build which already claims to be
> 0.7.2, so there are no guarantees whether the files produced by this
> windows version of beast work on any other beast.

Hm, what are the chances of releaseing ALPHA 0.7.2 win32 packages
(ZIP) of beast once the real 0.7.2 is out? Relocatability, scheme
support, etc aren't too bad for an alpha release (I'd recon the
browser URLs have to work though, to lead on people when they
have trouble).

>   Cu... Stefan
>
> (*) something like this has been done many times, for instance KDE4
> for windows, the FreeBSD ports approach, Gentoo's emerge, and many
> others
> --
> Stefan Westerfeld, Hamburg/Germany, http://space.twc.de/~stefan
> _______________________________________________
> beast mailing list
> beast@...
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/beast
>

Yours sincerely,
Tim Janik

---
http://lanedo.com/~timj/
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[Stefan Westerfeld]

   Hi!

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 02:37:31AM +0200, Tim Janik wrote:

> On Fri, 5 Jun 2009, Stefan Westerfeld wrote:
>
>> What is not working?
>> ====================
>> * Scheme support
>> * Priority adjustment of the threads
>> * Browser integration (go to URL from Beast)
>
> Isn't tihs something that should be fairly easily
> doable given standard windows APIs? I'd expect google
> to tunr up something quickly...

Right. It was not hard. I've added support for starting a browser which I
tested with both: file://c:/foo.html URLS and http://foo.de/bar.html URLs. The
code is in the win32 branch. However, while things like "Online Demos" work,
showing the FAQ does not work, because the docs/ and www/ directories are
excluded from building, because doxer does not work on windows. So the win32
build simply does not include the FAQ. So opening the FAQ right now results in
a "can not start browser" message.

>
>> * Size optimization of the installed version of Beast (right now C:\beast
>>  contains Mingw, MSys, ActivePerl, and some of the stuff is compiled with
>>  -g)
>> * Relocatabilty (beast will not work unless installed in C:\beast)
>> * probably something I've forgotten
>>
>> Note that this is an SVN snapshot build which already claims to be
>> 0.7.2, so there are no guarantees whether the files produced by this
>> windows version of beast work on any other beast.
>
> Hm, what are the chances of releaseing ALPHA 0.7.2 win32 packages
> (ZIP) of beast once the real 0.7.2 is out?

We can release self installing .exe releases; that works already. And yes,
I think its ready for an official ALPHA release with the same featureset
that the "real" BEAST 0.7.2 has.

> Relocatability, scheme
> support, etc aren't too bad for an alpha release (I'd recon the
> browser URLs have to work though, to lead on people when they
> have trouble).

Browser URLs: see above. Relocatability works in the win32 branch.

   Cu... Stefan
--
Stefan Westerfeld, Hamburg/Germany, http://space.twc.de/~stefan
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