Spring Win32 Autobuilder

[SpliFF]

I was thinking about the concept of an all-inclusive download to build Spring on Win32 (Spring "Developers Edition"). The concept would be to ease the learning curve for new developers wishing to try their hand at testing and patching Spring on Win32.

Frankly I've always found Win32 a pain to build a development environment on. All of the tools you need are out there but typically spread around many different sites. The current procedure for a mingw build is something like:

* determine which mingw packages you actually need, the website lists about 20 different downloads but only a couple are actually required.
* find, install and configure git
* find the current Spring mingw-libs package and put in correct place
* find and install cmake
* configure cmake
* cross fingers and build

It occurs to me that everything but the finger-crossing could be automated relatively easily, in a flow like:

* user downloads and runs developer edition installer. The installer includes little more than wget.exe, bash.exe and an install.sh script.
* installer downloads and installs git, mingw, mingw-libs, cmake
* downloads latest Spring via git (or give user choice to get latest stable branch)
* builds Spring with cmake
* (optionally) downloads a lightweight editor like SciTE and associates with source files.

At each step the installer could pause to explain what it is doing and show relevant command-line(s). This way user learns as the install progresses.

It's just an idea, not sure if i'd even have time to program this but I just thought I'd put the idea out there for feedback and possibly even adoption by anyone motivated enough.

[hoijui]

good idea!
the main problem would be maintanence though. you always haveto keep the links up to date.

..and why not use install.bat instead of bash.exe and install.sh? It should be enought for some wget and git calls.

[SpliFF]

For the simple reason that .BAT is a piss-poor language that makes my balls ache. Yes it's enough for simple things but scripts like this tend to grow with time and require more advanced behaviours. Anyway the bash.exe is about 50k so its inclusion would cause no additional burden (unlike say Python or Perl). Finally, .sh scripts are portable should anyone feel like modifying the script for a linux or OSX distro.

[Satirik]

*.vbs ... lot more powerful than bat and sh

[imbaczek]

vbs/js is much more powerful except when windows scripting host is disabled, which some people do.