[bt-devel] Windows Alpha 2?

[Greg Hellings]

On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 10:53 AM, Martin Gruner <mg.pub at gmx.net> wrote:
> Please call it svn-2009-03-03 or something like. Alpha1 would mean it is an
> "official" alpha release state, which it isn't. But we're going to have an alpha
> soon, hopefully.

Alrighty - I don't even think it will be advertised off of this list
and sword-devel until we get a proper NSIS installer made and have
tested the current build lots more.

Daniel Owens wrote:
>On WinXP Pro I uninstalled the previous build and installed the latest Alpha build, and it installed without a hitch.
>The program starts normally, and it looks BEAUTIFUL. Great job on getting png images in there. I made a
>correction on the wiki for that, but I don't have time to do much more testing today. I gather that the latest build
>doesn't tackle all the bugs identified already but just adds icons (which is a great step forward, don't get me
>wrong). Anyway, I am really excited about this. I need to find some time to work on the Vietnamese localization
>of BibleTime. If I had more time I would learn C++ and help you guys. Can you tell I am excited?

I assure you - not even half as excited as I am!  I know at least the
bug where the Bookshelf Manager would instantly crash has been fixed,
and so possibly others as well.

Barry Drake wrote:
>That's fantastic.  (The installer is horrible.  I hope Win. BibleTime will be packaged in something nice like NSIS
>before it gets to Beta).  Once installed, just brilliant.  Icons OK, bookshelf manager fine etc. etc.

I assure you - it will.  If only to allow us to locate other
Xiphos/BD/BibleCS/BPBible/etc installs, we'll have to graduate to
something more.  The packaging tool I'm using (Visual Studio 2008
itself, actually) doesn't allow me to do anything more than place
files or links on your hard drive with the installer and tell it where
the install location is.  Plus, I believe, it's a requirement that we
display the GPL during install, so that will mandate moving to a
better install tool.  This is just quick-and-dirty and lets me get a
build out there for people to quickly test.

>BTW - with regard to support.  I have given away one or two old boxes that really are not up to running anything
>later than Win 98.  They run BibleCS OK, but if BibleTime is able to work under '98 I would put that on (assuming
>I give any more away!).

Upon reflection backwards, Win98 and Win95 may not be the same beast.
If I understand my sense of OS history correctly, there was some
migration toward the full 32-bit interfaces, Unicode support and
others with Windows 98.  It might be possible that the Qt build and
BibleTime build from VS08 might just work in 95 - it really wouldn't
surprise me.  I understand it as a bit of a stepping stone along the
way from DOS to the NT family, with 95 being the first step and 98
being a later step.  Truth be told, I have a 98 install disk sitting
over on my bed at the moment, and if Virtual Box wasn't making my
system BSOD, I would install a VM and give it a try.  But none of us
will know anything for certain until we try it.  So, if you're feeling
adventurous and have a dilapidated old system sitting around, then I'd
say hook it up and give the installer a whirl.

>Bit if an oddity.  On loading, BT comes up with the following:
>(BibleTime 1.7.1.cvs) WARNING: Unlock key of module "NCV" is NOT valid!
><snip>
>
>Even so, they seem to work OK.  None of them are published modules (obviously).  I was just curious to see the >warnings on the debug console.

Have you ever used BibleTime and launched it from the command line in
Linux?  My guess is that this isn't a Windows-specific issue, but I
could be wrong.  Is it the case that your files have a module key in
the .conf file, but the module data files aren't actually encrypted?
I'm really just shooting in the dark here as to what the message could
really mean, but my knee-jerk reaction is that this isn't a
Windows-only issue.

>Just noticed that the sync button in the commentary window doesn't seem to work.  Forgive me if this is a known
>problem - I never actually found the sync button in the previous alpha - I thought there must be one, but it took a
>bit of locating!

This is a known issue, at least to myself.  It has been that way on
all the systems I've tried it on.  You can keep better track of the
issues at the bottom of this page:
http://devel.bibletime.info/wiki/Building_on_Windows in the section
titled "Issues."  Testing those that are already printed there is also
a good idea, and just mark them as SOLVED or such for now if they get
fixed, that way we can do regression testing through the alpha and
beta phase.

Thanks everyone for your feedback!  Keep the comments coming.  I'm
going to be testing it out this week for my weekly guys' meeting.  One
note - the verse highlighting theme appears differently in the
Configuration Dialog than it does in the actual module window.  In the
dialog, there is one slightly darker gray box around two lines of
text, and the box is a perfect rectangle despite the text ending at
different points on each line and beginning that way, as well.  In the
actual module window, when the text spans multiple lines, each line
clearly has its own boundary and displays overlapping the line above
or below it.  For those themes which have a border around the colored
text zone, this leaves it looking a bit messy and unpleasant.  I'm not
sure if this is just an artifact of using HTML with inline tags, or
from using the QtWebKit or from the Windows implementation
specifically.  The visual image is that the text for the selected
verse is more or less underlined, but in the end is looks really bad,
IMO.

If this version passes peoples' approval, I can start working on an
NSIS installer and possibly try the SVG plugin that Gary pointed me to
for support for those files so we can move closer to an official alpha
release.

--Greg