[Scummvm-devel] Daily/nightly Win32 builds

[Max Horn]

Simon,

Am 15.06.2011 um 15:05 schrieb Simon Sawatzki:

> Hello everyone,
> 
> a while ago the nightly build for Windows 32 bit was dropped as the maintainer Kirben left.

No, the daily builds were not dropped. The way they are done and the place they are hosted changed, though.

And yeah, there is room for improvement. In particular, 

> 
> I suggested that a friend of mine could take over building them automatically (and he was not just "some friend" but he has already worked with me on the German GUI translation). I need to apologize for recommending him as he seems illoyal and unreliable.
> 
Please cut out that crap. Nobody said your friend was "illoyal and unreliable". The reasons why we don't want a stranger to do these builds were explained, and have nothing to do with your friend -- how could they, given that we don't know your friend at all? All we know about your friend is that he's your friend. So far, he hasn't even talked to us directly. To build a trust relationship, he need to interact with the team himself, not via you as a proxy.

Anyway, let's get back to discuss how to improve things, and stop beating this dead horse



> I also noticed that the Buildbot actually strip the scummvm.exe to make its size smaller. You came up with the objection that some debugging features would be lost. Then I dropped the matter as I was busy.

We could provide both a stripped and an unstripped build. I see no fundamental problem with doing that. Just somebody has to sit down and take some time to implement this.

One way would be to duplicate the two mingw build rules, adding a second build identical to the first but which adds a stripping step. This would be very easy to implement, and since we use ccache, the overhead for that would be relatively small. 

A nicer solution would be to modify the packaging step in such a way that it can generate two binaries from a single build. This could also be done for other ports if we think it makes sense.

Finally, the easiest "solution" would be to just always perform stripping for the win32 builds; but I really would prefer to also offer a build with debug symbols; after all, the primary purpose of these daily builds is not to let people play these games for fun; but rather for people to provide useful feedback on (new) stuff. 


> I read in the forum that Kirben gave the scripts to the team that he used to create the Windows version with its installer etc.
> Did anything come out of it?

The scripts are in dists/win32/ScummVM.iss

However, the plan is to stop using these, and switch to NSIS for the installer. Unlike InnoSetup, NSIS also works on Linux and other operating systems. Hence. with NSIS, we can create a Windows installer with buildbot, too.

Littleboy was working on that, and I hope he'll finialize that work soon, and help us on setting this up on buildbot.


> For me personally it would be sufficient if the buildbot was set up to make one stripped build and one unstripped build. Due to my internet traffic limit I'm dependent on small builds. 44 MB are quite much to download when it could be ~ 2 MB. That's why I ask if it is possible to get smaller builds as they serve me for testing out recent changes to ScummVM here and there.

I am not sure where you get the 2 MB figure (the 1.3.0 installer was 4.6 MB). But I do fully agree that 44 MB is quite hefty! So, this indeed should be improved.


Cheers,
Max