Recommended build instructions ...

[Michael Meeks]

Hi there,

     Quick sob-story, my laptop died (RIP), and I urgently needed a new 
one at the conference. So I bought a Windows 10 thing - new out of the 
box, and took advantage of the situation to read and follow the 
instructions from the wiki.

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/BuildingOnWindows

     Which recommended lode:

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/lode

     With remarkably little effort I did an impression of a clueless 
newbie ;-) here are my findings; and I believe we should take some swift 
action, and get some principles nailed down.


* I was excited about Chocolatey

     I read the website, thought 'wow Windows is getting its act 
together', then I tried to use it. The downloads complained of not being 
signed, I ignored that, but still they refused to work - eventually I 
gave up, and moved on to manual installation.

*  Recommending a known-good Visual Studio

     The LODE page for some reason recommends Visual Studio 2015 - three 
times, though there is 2013 in the small print. I was to discover many 
hours later that in fact LibreOffice x86 on the libreoffice-5-2 branch 
(at least) doesn't compile in this configuration. I was surprised to 
find out that this is a well known problem later. We should not be 
documenting and recommending a known-problematic configuration to 
beginners - even if everyone is rightly excited about moving to the new 
compiler =)

     => will propose at the ESC that we recommend to beginners only those
        configurations which we know build - ie. have a tinderbox, and CI
        support to keep them working all the time.

     This is somewhat more problematic, since (apparently) installing 
first 2015 and then 2013 results in a truck-load of other odd behaviors, 
which are really hard to fix without re-instaling (so the paranoid meme 
goes ;-)

* Antivirus

     I was broken by McAffe - it broke git - the simple clone failed 
with a permissions problem. We have a not-very-explicit "turn off AV" 
messaging but not in the LODE (or devcentral) pages, and we should do 
that earlier I think; step #1 ;-)

     Anyhow - thought I'd provide my feedback; I hope the solutions are 
obvious and we can clean this up nicely at least until 2015 is 
guarenteed to work by CI etc. =)

     HTH,

         Michael.

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