Re: Automated build script for Windows builds

[Peter TB Brett <peter@peter-b.co.uk>]

Hi Mads,

Glad to see I'm not the only person who's building Guile for Windows!

For the gEDA project, which uses Guile quite extensively, we've for
quite some years had a recipe-based cross-build system called "minipack"
that's use for cross-compiling Guile and the geda-gaf electronic design
package.

    https://github.com/peter-b/minipack

Do you think that there might be some scope for collaboration around
minipack?  It might be a good approach for avoiding duplication of
effort in this area, and would mean that more time can be spent on
improving Guile on Windows rather than just getting it working.

I've identified two things that I'd really like to get some help with:

* Guile is happy to be built with an i686-w64-mingw32 compiler, but it
  fails to build with an x86_64-w64-mingw32 compiler.  This is because
  of the implementation of scm_i_inum2big().  This is happy to be
  compiled on LP64 systems (where sizeof(long) == 8).  However, Windows
  x64 is an LLP64 system where sizeof(int) == sizeof(long) == 4, meaning
  that scm_i_inum2big() doesn't work.  I'm not sure what would be
  involved with addressing this, but until it is fixed, it's not
  possible to compile a 64-bit Guile for Windows.

* Currently, it's necessary to define the GUILE_LOAD_COMPILED_PATH,
  GUILE_LOAD_PATH and (optionally) GUILE_SYSTEM_EXTENSIONS_PATH
  environment variables before guile.exe will run on a Windows systems.
  Ideally, I'd like to be able to provide a relocatable Windows build
  that could be provided as an archive that could be extracted anywhere
  and run with no additional configuration.  What would be involved in
  enabling libguile to guess appropriate load paths on Windows without
  having to faff around with Windows' awkward environment variable
  configuration UI?

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me out with these two issues!

                              Peter

-- 
Dr Peter Brett <peter@peter-b.co.uk>