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working installer for Zim 0.4x on windows -- not published yet; I have questions

 

Hi Jaap,

At long last, I have a working NSIS-based installer for Zim 0.4x for
Windows. Thanks very much to Eugene Schava for submitting build-win32.py
back in January.

Here's what I have:
* README-BUILD-win32.txt -- explains where to get all the dependencies
(GTK+, PyGTK, Bazaar, NSIS) and how to run the build and package scripts.
* build-win32.py -- I had to add a couple of lines of code here on top of
what Eugene wrote.
* create-zim-setup.nsi -- NSIS installer build script
* register-extension.nsh -- NSIS function to register a file type in the
Windows shell
* zim-logo-big.bmp -- big logo for Setup wizard

create-zim-setup.nsi creates an installer package (.exe) in
./windows/release, with a size of about 17MB.

My questions are these:

Due to the excellent support of Windows from the Python ecosystem, very
little needs to be added to the pyzim source tree to support building a
binary for Windows and packaging for Windows. Therefore, we should integrate
my additions directly into the pyzim source tree. Correct?

If so, where exactly will they go? Right now I've got

README-BUILD-win32.txt
build-win32.py
--> in ./
create-zim-setup.nsi
register-extensionnsh
zim-logo-big.bmp
--> in ./windows/build

Should *.nsi, *.nsh and *.bmp really in ./windows/build? Where would you put
them, Jaap, if you were doing this?

Is "README-BUILD-win32.txt" named correctly? (Again, it's a list of
instructions for installing dependencies and creating the installer
package.)

I assume I should follow standard Bazaar procedure outline here
http://doc.bazaar.canonical.com/latest/en/user-guide/sending_changes.html
to submit my changes to you, once I'm ready, yes?

What about the installer .exe file? Who will host that? I don't mind having
me personally take charge running the Windows build process a day or two
after I see you announce a new Zim version, but I think it ought to be
hosted directly at
http://zim-wiki.org/downloads/
if 17MB isn't too much of a load on the web hosting provider. (If it is,
then let's keep it at Google Code where I published my installer for the
Perl version last year.) What do I need to do with my installer to get it
published on zim-wiki.org? Alternative Jaap if you have direct easy access
to a reliable Windows system, you can do the build and take me out of the
loop if you'd like.

Oh and one more thing! There's a tiny bit in the NSIS script that's not
automated: the maintainer needs to manually enter the Zim version number and
the official date tag for this build into the script source before running
it. I don't have access to a Windows server that can perform automatic
builds in response to Jaap checking in new code in lp:zim, so I'm not
inclined to fix this shortcoming in the build process. If we DID want to go
with automated builds, I could probably fix it so it set the version number
and build date automatically. Comments on this, anyone?

Brendan Kidwell

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