Help needed testing automatic win64 configuration

[Rainer Schuetze]

On 29.10.2013 21:36, Brad Anderson wrote:
> On Monday, 28 October 2013 at 19:14:17 UTC, Rainer Schuetze wrote:
>>
>> I finally got around to making a version of Visual D that should work
>> for x64 out of the box with both the zip distribution and the new D
>> windows installer. Unfortunately it has to override the settings made
>> by the installer to sc.ini.
>>
>
> As in, make change to sc.ini itself?  If so, what kind of changes?
>

No. Visual D now calls the linker by itself, but extracts settings from 
sc.ini. To allow linking to the C runtime library of the current VS, it 
has to provide the respective path. You can also override the linker 
executable to avoid troubles with the mspdb*.dll dependencies. In 
addition, invoking the 32-bit linker allows monitoring file accesses to 
generate library dependencies.

>> I have prepared a release candidate here:
>>
>> https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/visuald/releases
>>
>
> I'll try it out when I get a free moment.
>
>> 3 tiny nitpicks regarding the D installer:
>> - it does not remember the directory of a previous installation
>
> Good idea. This is easy enough to do.
>
>> - it is listed in the "Program and Features" as a mere "D" without any
>> further info. That could be a bit more verbose.
>
> The creation of the installer predates my interest in D so I never know
> whether things like that were intentional or not. "DMD - Digital Mars D
> Language Compiler" maybe?
>

That sounds ok for the "DisplayName". Other entries to fill could be 
"DisplayIcon", "DisplayVersion", "Publisher" and "Comments".

>> - it would be nice if it could also provide a download of the 64-bit
>> curl library
>>
>
> Another thing I'm trying to find some free time to do.  The 32-bit
> version could use some updating to a more recent version of curl as
> well. If someone else with more free time wants to do this all I did to
> make it originally was run implib over a curl dll to make the OMF import
> library and put it in a zip file with a directory structure that matches
> dmd's zip so that when the installer unzips it everything just falls
> into place. For 64-bit I'd just add the 64-bit curl libraries to the new
> fangled lib64.

I have a 32-bit version of the curl library built from the same source 
as the 64-bit version (i.e. 7.28.1). This is a single DLL without all 
the additional DLL dependencies.

>
>> The link to the Visual D installer will probably get invalid pretty
>> soon, so maybe we should add some "LATEST" file somewhere in the
>> repository to grab the link to the latest release?
>
> Yeah, I wasn't sure how to handle that situation. A web server redirect
> would be the easiest to do normally but D's webserver situation is
> difficult to work with since you have to ask someone to make the changes
> and nobody but Walter, Andrei, and Jan really know what the webserver
> setup is like.

The link on the download page needs updating anyway, so uploading a link 
file should not make it any more problematic.

>
> We could also just update the installer periodically. There is no reason
> it needs to be tied to DMD's release cycle.

I agree, shouldn't be a big deal, but reducing the number of things to 
update for a release would be nice.