[bt-devel] BibleTime 2.0.alpha2 is released

[Greg Hellings]

On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 10:59 PM, Jonathan Marsden <jmarsden at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> Martin Gruner wrote:

>> @Eeli, Gary: how close are we to a 2.0 release?
>> Can we estimate a time frame?
>  * Create and test installers for all available platforms (including
> Windows, if 2.0 is to be a Windows-capable release).  Is anyone building
>  and testing under OS X using Qt/Mac yet? :)

Building and installing under Qt/Mac is really no different than
building and installing under Linux.  Just make sure you have the gcc
toolchain from Apple installed, install the required libraries (I
suggest using one of the available Mac package managers, but that's
definitely not necessary.  I find macports has all of the necessary
ones including qt4-mac while fink tends to lag behind macports in
up-to-dateness.  Either should work, and you'll find that Manfred has
the opposite opinion as I do as to which package manager to use.)
which include, possibly not exhaustively, CLucene, libicu, cURL,
cmake, libsword, boost and qt4-mac and then build BibleTime as normal.
 You can even tell it to install directly to /Applications if you're
that bold, and it should drop a normal double-clickable .app folder
into the Applications directory.


> Lastly, it's a bit debatable to call this a release requirement, but I'd
> also suggest that it would be very much preferable if the code was known
> to build correctly under Windows using a free (libre) toolchain.  I'm
> still waiting on a description of the current MinGW toolchain setup
> process before looking any further at this... without one, I seem to
> just be going over ground others have already covered.  I don't know if
> anyone else has made any progress towards this?

Personally I disagree.  Building on Windows with a libre toolchain is
neither a show stopper nor even important to me.  Visual Studio is
both the native compiler system and, in my opinion, far superior to
MinGW, MSYS, Cygwin or anything else I've ever seen in the GNU/Windows
world.  If you want, the directions for getting where I've gotten with
MSYS are as follows:

Download the MSYS installer (the .exe file) and run it.
Download the technology preview version of the .tar.bz2 files for more
recent updates to the MSYS packages and install them.
Download and install either the standard MinGW compiler (woefully out
of date) or one of the drop-in replacements (the address escapes my
fingertips at the moment, but I can get you the version that I used).
Then just download and install the libraries that are required -
CLucene, libicu, cURL, libsword, cmake, boost, etc - the same way you
would in Linux using the MSYS shell.
Try to build BibleTime -- it failed for me, but if it succeeds for
someone, I'd be interested to find out how and why.

However, I don't consider this a priority enough to spend time on
trying to figure out why it fails or think that it should at all hold
up releasing for Windows.

--Greg