[rfc] six-month stable release cycles

[John Arbash Meinel]

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Michael B. Trausch wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Jul 2009, Gary van der Merwe wrote:
> 
>> On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 3:20 AM, Martin Pool<mbp at sourcefrog.net> wrote:
>>>
>>> I think the most pressing question here is, how do we get more
>>> horsepower onto the whole Windows release process, and not leave it on
>>> John's shoulders.  Can we do anything that will get one of the people
>>> who feel strongly about the installer to help with building it?  What
>>> is stopping them at the moment?  We have a few things from this
>>> thread, or already in train:
>>
>> For me, one for the things stopping me from volunteering to build the
>> windows binaries, is a lack of a copy of VS 2008 which is required to
>> build tbzr.
> 
> Hrm... the express edition, or the SDK itself which contains the
> compilers and the libraries, won't do it?
> 
>     --- Mike

Unfortunately, no. The SDK gives you ATL version 3 or so, which is very
out of date. TBZR is written against ATL 7+ (probably 9, since that is
what would ship with VC 9).

I tried getting it working myself a while ago.

On the other hand, the only bit that needs to be compiled that way is a
tiny shim. It is designed so that we have a very lightweight dll that is
resident with anything that uses Explorer, which calls out via RPC (COM,
I believe) to a service to do all the real work.

The main reason for this is that if you just use python as your shim,
then it has to load the python2.X.dll into the running process whenever
you use the platform File Open dialogs. And if the running process
*also* is running a different version of python, etc. It gets ugly.

I wish I knew more ATL + COM + ... so that I could do a bit more with
that part of the binary.

Anyway, for people who don't have VC9, we *do* have a shared windows
host where we build the packages which has all the current dependencies
available.

We certainly are willing to give access to someone who is willing to
maintain the win32 installer.

Though I'll also note we *should* have a second bare-windows VM that you
can load up to test the installer, etc.

We'd like to move away from our current virtual host (kerguelen) because
it has severe DNS issues, but we just haven't taken the full time to get
a complete Windows VM up and running w/ full packages installed on
something like Amazon EC2. I think there is also a support request
within Canonical to get a directly controlled host for these things, but
that sort of thing generally is pretty low on the priority list.

John
=:->

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