Current recommended method for Windows builds?

Greetings. I had previously succeeded at building matplotlib in Windows XP
using Visual Studio 2003. (Thanks to Charlie Moad for much guidance!) I'm
now running Win7RC and want to set up builds in that OS for Python 2.5. I
read in the messages of May 28 about the release build script at
trunk/matplotlib/release/win32 in SVN. So, I'm wondering whether to (a) build
as I did previously, with VS2003 or mingw using trunk/matplotlib/setup.py and
dependencies in win32_static, or (b) build with mingw using
trunk/matplotlib/release/win32/Makefile and dependencies installed there.
What approach is recommended currently?

Regarding (a), I saw Charlie's message of Apr. 10 about an updated
win32_static.zip file, but requests for
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/win32_static.zip and win32_static_vs.zip
yield 404s, while win32_static.tar.gz and win32_static_vs.tar.gz date
internally from 2005 and 2006, respectively. Is the newer archive available?

Regarding (b), would I still install ActiveTCL to \Tcl and the GTK dev package
to \GTK, as in approach (a)?

Stan West wrote:

Greetings. I had previously succeeded at building matplotlib in Windows XP
using Visual Studio 2003. (Thanks to Charlie Moad for much guidance!) I'm
now running Win7RC and want to set up builds in that OS for Python 2.5. I
read in the messages of May 28 about the release build script at
trunk/matplotlib/release/win32 in SVN. So, I'm wondering whether to (a) build
as I did previously, with VS2003 or mingw using trunk/matplotlib/setup.py and
dependencies in win32_static, or (b) build with mingw using
trunk/matplotlib/release/win32/Makefile and dependencies installed there.
What approach is recommended currently?

Regarding (a), I saw Charlie's message of Apr. 10 about an updated
win32_static.zip file, but requests for
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/win32_static.zip and win32_static_vs.zip
yield 404s, while win32_static.tar.gz and win32_static_vs.tar.gz date
internally from 2005 and 2006, respectively. Is the newer archive available?

Regarding (b), would I still install ActiveTCL to \Tcl and the GTK dev package
to \GTK, as in approach (a)?
  
Hi Stan,

(This is unfortunately not an answer to your questions.)

I am interested in getting the buildbot infrastructure to build
automatic nightly binaries for Windows (XP was my thought, but 7 would
also be good). If you you'd be willing to perform the work to automate
build and installation from the svn repo on either your own machine or a
virtual machine running in my linux box (presuming I could get Windows 7
running in VirtualBox), you could itch your own scratch as well as help
the MPL community.

The basic idea is that the buildbot triggers a script (or scripts) on
the buildslave machine. In particular, I have written
test/_buildbot_install.py and test/_buildbot_test.py to sequentially
install (to a virtualenv) and test MPL. Right now these are only tested
on Ubuntu, but I wrote them to be cross platform. John Hunter wrote
test/_buildbot_mac_sage.sh to do the same steps on a Mac, but it's very
installation-specific. The buildmaster simply calls these scripts,
failing if the exit code is non-zero.

It is still on my TODO list to build binaries and upload to a server,
but I think this will be pretty trivial once the first part is worked out.

Regardless of whether you can help with the buildbot automation part, if
you take notes about what you did, I'm sure it will help whomever comes
after you in the process.

-Andrew

Andrew Straw wrote:

I am interested in getting the buildbot infrastructure to build
automatic nightly binaries for Windows (XP was my thought, but 7 would
also be good). If you you'd be willing to perform the work to automate
build and installation from the svn repo on either your own machine or a
virtual machine running in my linux box (presuming I could get Windows 7
running in VirtualBox)

Hmm, it seems MS disabled Windows 7 RC downloads. So I'm unable to
create such a virtual machine.

-Andrew

From: Andrew Straw [mailto:strawman@…36…]
Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2009 14:26

Hmm, it seems MS disabled Windows 7 RC downloads. So I'm
unable to create such a virtual machine.

One alternative is the 90-day trial of Windows 7 Enterprise:

Windows 7 Technical Library Roadmap | Microsoft Learn.

From: Andrew Straw [mailto:strawman@…36…]
Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2009 13:50

I am interested in getting the buildbot infrastructure to
build automatic nightly binaries for Windows (XP was my
thought, but 7 would also be good). If you you'd be willing
to perform the work to automate build and installation from
the svn repo on either your own machine or a virtual machine
running in my linux box (presuming I could get Windows 7
running in VirtualBox), you could itch your own scratch as
well as help the MPL community.

  . . . .

Regardless of whether you can help with the buildbot
automation part, if you take notes about what you did, I'm
sure it will help whomever comes after you in the process.

-Andrew

Hi, Andrew. I'm happy to share what I learn along the way. At this point,
I'm trying to get clear about the various build approaches that are in play.
The impression I'm forming is that what I called method (a) is the legacy
method, if you will, and the developers are trying to implement two automated
build systems: one for releases -- method (b) -- and one for the buildbot, and
apparently there are some distinctions between those two. Is that right?

By the way, my XP partition is still bootable, so I'm not restricted to Win 7
and may be able to help with an XP buildbot.