[sword-devel] Windows Builds

[Chris Little]

On 1/20/2014 5:18 PM, Greg Hellings wrote:
> A few things are striking me as odd about the Windows build of the
> utilities when compiling with Visual Studio Express 2013
>
> 1) Several utilities simply fail to run. Namely add* all bring up
> Windows crash/error boxes immediately upon run with no output. Is this
> typical?

Yep. They crash. I don't have an explanation. They're rather old and 
C-ish, so they might never have worked on Windows. I have a feeling that 
any time spent looking for the cause would be better spend doing almost 
anything else in the world.

It's probably best to simply quit building & distributing them.

> 2) installmgr isn't working properly. Once it attempts to connect out
> over the network, it just spits out a continuous stream of dashes that
> would typically indicate progress. Is this a breakage in newer curls? I
> have built the latest, which is 7.34.0. The latest that I have on Fedora
> is 7.29.0.

Can't reproduce. Works fine for me.

> 3) By default the libsword target links against the debug version of
> curl but the release version of ICU. Is this intentional? Both have
> built fine for me from the looks of it, out of the icu-sword directory.

*By default the libsword DEBUG target ....
I switched cURL over to release just to require one less build.

> 4) Is icu-sword still necessary? I don't know what it was trying to
> overcome in ICU's at the time it was created, but it's a bit behind the
> ICU 52.1 that is current now (icu-sword seems to be reporting as 4.6). I
> doubt there's much that is wrong in 4.6, just less complete than 52.
> I've successfully built against 5.2 without any seeming difficulty.

Yes. icu-sword has two functions and will never be updated beyond ICU 4.6.

The first function is to house additional data (transliterators) until 
they are all submitted to CLDR. They're roughly correctly formatted now, 
but I still need to go through them and test them semi-systematically 
before submitting each of them.

The second function is to give Troy an ICU implementation for BibleCS 
that works in BCB5. I categorically refuse to aid in any further 
development of BibleCS, so I will never update icu-sword beyond ICU 4.6.

That has nothing to do with the win32 utilities binaries. I've always 
built with the latest releases of everything, including ICU. The first 
release of the 1.7.0 utilities included ICU 51 (patched with our 
additional data). A subsequent release, on the date of ICU 52's release, 
built against ICU 52 (patched with our additional data).

--Chris