Re: Building SVN (dependencies) on Windows

Graham Bloice wrote on Thu, 23 Apr 2020 17:17 +0100:
> Apologies for butting in, but as a long time maintainer of the (mainly
> Windows) build process for Wireshark, another cross platform project, I'd
> like to offer my thoughts on such matters to the svn project.

Welcome & thanks!

> I see a number of advantages with the Wireshark solution:
>
> 3. Consistency across builds for all users, no local variations causing
> oddities.

I'm not so sure about this. As a sysadmin, uniformity enables
scalability, which is good — but as developers of software to be used on
any Unix-like or Windows-like operating system, uniformity enables
hidden dependencies and hides bugs.

In our case, our buildbot builders use different architectures,
operating systems, C compilers, dependency libraries, and configure-
 and build-time options; that's deliberate, to make sure we don't write,
say, code that's only correct on little-endian architectures, or
depends on a particular compiler vendor's language extensions, etc..

(Also, there's the single point of failure concern: what happens if
someone manages to replace the centralized set of .dll's with
a malicious one?)

> You can see the sausages being made over at the Wireshark buildbot:
> https://buildbot.wireshark.org/wireshark-master/waterfall, in particular
> the "ran CMake" generation step, although if there are no updates to the
> libraries it's a standard CMake experience.
>

For reference, our buildbot is at https://subversion.apache.org/buildbot/all
(though the signal-to-noise of that particular view is a little low due
to the the hourly builders on the first few columns).

> P.S. I did build svn on Windows once, many years ago and I found it an
> awkward process.

I think when I first built svn on Windows, it took me a week to get it
to work…

Cheers,

Daniel
Received on 2020-04-28 19:06:58 CEST