22 Dec 2005

AbiWord or, behaving maintainerly

I now have some deal of free time to work on AbiWord. I figure that before I start work on the Unicode things that will be done for 2.6, I should at least work on being able to build CVS HEAD, since some significant (at least win building-wise) changes have gone in. Most difficult is that we now use the “system wv” library, and depend on wv 1.2.0, which has to be compiled separately against some of its own dependencies. Starting with my detailed instructions to build 2.4, I am working on a set for CVS/2.5/2.6. The first thing I am doing is breaking down the dependencies and finding out exactly what is the minimum needed to complete any task (build wv binaries, build mathview binaries, build linkgrammar binaries, build abi, tools, or imp/exp), since for the previous version, that was all in one monolithic list of dependencies. That will also help me know when I can upgrade these in upstream versions without inducing breakage.

Right now, I am strugging to build wv, which is a strange thing. Everybody (well, uwog) has said that it’s fairly straightforward, but as I’m starting again from a clean install of MinGW/MSYS, with the aim of documenting everything, I need to know what incidental voodoo made it easy. The first trouble was that without the MSYS DTK (which was removed from the build environment instructions for 2.4 due to some mathview problem which may or may not have been caused by it), autotools won’t work, even though I install them manually and have a working install of ActiveState Perl. At the moment, I can ./autogen.sh and get partway through ./configure –prefix=/mingw, but it stops when it says it encounters an error with GLIB. I have installed GLIB 2.6.6 from TML, and this shouldn’t be a stopping point, but it is at the moment. If anyone has any clue why this is, pointers would be greatly appreciated. (Yes, I tried an older glib version, though apparently wv 1.2 needs a recent glib, so looks like we’ll be upgrading across the board for abi 2.5/6 to glib 2.6).

When I feel sufficiently motivated to reboot out of Ubuntu AMD64 back into Windows, I’ll poke some more at it. I could really use VMWare, now that I think of it. If anyone cares to give me a very expensive Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Winter Solstice gift, that would reduce the trouble of working on Windows

Till next time, enjoy using AbiWord! (Keep your eyes peeled for 2.4.2 - it will apparently rock one’s socks right off, or darn near.)

Syndicated 2005-12-22 23:09:32 from code art life - Ryan Pavlik on ClearDefinition