CAUTION:Re: [svk-devel] Win32 test path separator patch against trunk

[Kevin Light]

Richard,

> > I've been avoiding installing the "full" compiler set because if I
> > ever get it easily working I figured I could share my results which
> > wouldn't require the large $$ investment of the full suite.  I'm
> > thinking it may help others on low budgets who would like to tinker
> > with SVK but need to live on a win32 platform.  With the removal of
> > the VCToolKit and the Express version not working, I guess my hopes
> > are short lived. :(      
> > 
> 
> I think this is a nice sentiment, but I wonder whether or not it's
> the
> binary distro that will make people's lives easier or the recipe for
> building? Also, I think the key to trying to give people a recipe for
> building that uses free tools, is working through the issues with
> MingGW... it's going to have long-term support, and will always
> remain
> free.

I've been thinking about this a bit more and it seems that the current need is for something that could be used immediately to help get SVK built and running on Win32.  It would seem that a binary release of a working Perl with all of SVK's dependencies which did not require a compiler might be the best short term solution.

In the long term it looks like Strawberry Perl will be the way to go.  Any effort that we'd put into making it work should help that project along as well.

> > Oh yeah, the distro assembly is kinda of easy.  Install an existing
> > copy.  Then copy the newly built SVK folders into the installed
> > version.  The docs/manifest and tests need to also be copied over. 
> > If there were any dependency changes, they need to be copied from
> > your perl installation as well. The current distros are built with
> a
> > stripped down version of Perl 5.8.6.  Here is where building your
> own
> > version of Perl comes in handy.  Then using the NSIS installer
> > builder, rebuild the distro.
> 
> Not being a real perl hacker, I'm a bit unsure how you stripped it
> down.
> For instance, I note that the /lib/SVN and lib/auto/SVN directories
> are
> in the PERLPREFIX rather than the SITEPREFIX that my normal build of
> Perl is using.
> 
> Did you just copy all the site libs that you wanted from the site
> directory, and then removed all SITEPREFIX modules except SVK?

To date I haven't stripped a built version of perl as it was recommended to just repackage the current binary release with its files updated to support the SVK being packaged.  It would seem that it should be possible to script something to take a development perl system and extract the required SVK dependencies into a smaller footprint build which could then be packaged into a new distro.

One thing I realized today was that the Perl image I posted has a "too new" version of YAML.  I believe it was recommended to stick with YAML-0.58 for the 1.X series as the newer YAML's break backwards compatibility.  CPAN installs the latest when building SVK's dependencies.
See:
http://colabti.de/irclogger/irclogger_log/svk?date=2006-07-17,Mon&sel=184#l300
and
http://colabti.de/irclogger/irclogger_log/svk?date=2006-07-26,Wed&sel=11#l33
If you build SVK-1.08 with it and use it on an existing repository it will update your config files such that you will not be able to downgrade to a previous release or an older version YAML.

Kevin