remarks about development wiki / LODE

[Thorsten Behrens]

Hi Dennis,

Dennis Roczek wrote:
> If this "tutorial" is for newbees, then tell them that Windows 7+ is
> supported, otherwise some might come with an old Windows XP or even
> stranger system.
>
Very well, added that. ;)

> In the end this situation is because of a missing motivation to keep
> the requirements on track. Doesn't matter where: buildbots,
> tinderboxes, google fuzz, cloph (release), wiki, scripts,
> etc... Mostly a simply message to the ml is missing. (This is just
> an observation by mainly non-dev / non-builder; just a reader of
> wiki, irc, mailing lists, etc; exception this week about font-python
> stuff)
> 
Hmm, not sure exactly what you're referring to - the Perl font module
prerequisite change was perhaps not done perfectly, but ended up in
LODE within half a day or so.

The hope is that on average (there's always the chance of 'bad luck',
like master broken, lode not up-to-date, MS ships a new service pack
that configure doesn't quite get right just yet etc), lode and the
referenced wiki page is the place to go to easily replicate a working
LibreOffice setup for Windows.

I know this is not perfect (I've personally spent a week wall-clock on
getting a build going on a well-worn VS 2015 install, with a metric
ton of other dev work + respective tools installed on the machine,
which was interferring in most interesting ways), but we can only
improve from there iteratively. One idea I had in mind was to use the
msbuild configs from VS, instead of manually trawling the registry &
eternally fixing up after MS updates. Another one is this chocolatey
thingit, perhaps combined with Vagrant, so even if we cannot legally
distribute a Windows VM, we can perhaps have configuration scripts
around to stand one up from scratch easily.

If anyone's interested in that, I can provide pointers & snippets.

> Docker would maybe possible with the latest (TM) Windows 10 stuff.
> 
How so? If you want to build under Linux, your best bet is still to
use one natively.

> This is more a general problem not willing to write at least a few
> minutes to a ML hoping this can be found on google; maybe pinging at
> least buildbots-owners to know that they have to install stuff ,
> well or simply to help newcomers because they will might help you in
> a half year (or not!).
> 
Yeah, there's some truth to that. There's been some encouragement in
the past 6 months or so to have people doing larger changes to
announce that to the list here. But it bears repeating. ;)

> For this a general overview is often missing. (This is not a rant
> saying the TDF should do that, this is simply a rant!)
> 
Concretely, what for? For the code itself, that's a truly hard problem
(with people like Chris trying to tackle it via book writing).

Cheers,

-- Thorsten
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