Windows and PropGCC without SimpleIDE
DavidZemon
Posts: 2,973
I'm working on PropWare's final touches before the first ever "official release". One of my biggest pain points has been Windows. I would like to use GNU Make, but I only know of two versions:
1) Easy download, straight from GNU, the binary was built in 2006. YIKES! (http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/make.htm)
2) Part of MinGW's MSYS. Much more recent, but comes with a ton of bloat for a tiny program
The first option works great sometimes. But if your PATH variable contains any parenthesis, it hits an exception and dies. Not good for anyone on a 64-bit machine with a "Program Files (x86)" folder.
I gave Ninja a shot, but CMake's Ninja files are hiding stdout, which isn't good if you're trying to invoke propeller-load as a build target!
Perhaps this is why Parallax forced jazzed to build SimpleIDE without using Makefiles.
I need suggestions. PropWare requires CMake and CMake requires a secondary build system like Make... who has ideas for Windows?
1) Easy download, straight from GNU, the binary was built in 2006. YIKES! (http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/make.htm)
2) Part of MinGW's MSYS. Much more recent, but comes with a ton of bloat for a tiny program
The first option works great sometimes. But if your PATH variable contains any parenthesis, it hits an exception and dies. Not good for anyone on a 64-bit machine with a "Program Files (x86)" folder.
I gave Ninja a shot, but CMake's Ninja files are hiding stdout, which isn't good if you're trying to invoke propeller-load as a build target!
Perhaps this is why Parallax forced jazzed to build SimpleIDE without using Makefiles.
I need suggestions. PropWare requires CMake and CMake requires a secondary build system like Make... who has ideas for Windows?
Comments
-Mike R.
Cygwin is definitely an interesting option. Is there any way to get just Make out of cygwin without requiring all of Cygwin?
@Dave Hein,
I wish I knew why it worked on your machine and not mine
--EDIT--
False alarm. I tried it on another Windows box and it failed. It needs /bin/sh which only worked the first time around because I had GitBash installed.
I hypothesize that...
anyone incapable or unwilling to install Cygwin & Make will also likely be incapable or unwilling to use PropWare's build system at the command line. That person is now incapable of utilizing PropWare's build system because, for all intents and purposes, it must be used at the command line (can't easily debug from within an IDE since debugging is done from propeller-load, not gdb)
So perhaps a better idea is to...
provide detailed and well-tested instructions for utilizing PropWare's libraries in SimpleIDE. I already provide a zip with all static libraries and header files, so this shouldn't be too big of a task.
Long term, perhaps SimpleIDE could ship with PropWare's libraries, and the build system could be simplified from the current phenominal but magical black box that no one but jazzed understands.
I hope Parallax have a spec for how it works. I hope it's documented in more places than Steve's head and the codebase itself.
But if the libraries were built prior to packaging SimpleIDE, the build system wouldn't have to be so complicated. PropWare has ~100 lines of CMake script that iterate through the propsideworkspace folder from Git and determine all source and header files that are part of the Simple Libraries. The source files are compiled into static libraries, and the headers are then flattened into a single directory. Simple
Of course, I'm sure Parallax also want users to be able to browse the source code - so the Learn folder could still be provided via SimpleIDE... but it doesn't have to be searched during the build process.
I work with an enterprise app that requires a few things get done for a command prompt to really work. They found it easier to just supply one rather than take on all the many support requests associated with setting one up. There is a seemingly endless set of things people can and will do somehow to fail on the standard prompt.
That way, there is one known good reference case users can use to identify if their environment is a problem or not.
Heh, that would be nice. But the makefiles are generated by cmake - I can't mess with them in that way. Not without abandoning cmake entirely
That's a really good idea. I'll see about implementing that!
The lack of a spec sheet could imply to me that they (Parallax) don't care? Or they assumed emails to and from Steve would be sufficient?
In any case, I'm not too interested in tackling SimpleIDE changes at the moment - just pipe dreams. I gave up trying to convert SimpleIDE to use PropWare as a build system. I was able to make some progress there, but the work involved was a dark rabbit hole with no end in sight, and no users requesting said work either.
"getting SimpleIDE to work" is pretty ambiguous. You are right that I had SimpleIDE invoking PropWare to build a project and run it in the GUI terminal, but that was about the extent that I'd completed anything. After that, I spent many hours trying to re-write its project model to work better with PropWare (so that you could create new projects, modify project settings, etc) and that's when I found myself deep, deep into the rabbit hole... and no way to know how deep it went. It's far from the worst codebase I've seen by a long shot, but it's also not perfect. So with no one to provide guidance, no written requirements for what it's supposed to do, and no one having ever requested I do the work in the first place, I just gave up and am now concentrating on PropWare. I was terrified that I was going to pour an ungodly number of hours into it, present my work to Parallax, and them say they like SimpleIDE just the way it is.