[m-users.] Installing a subset of built grades

[Julien Fischer]

Hi,

On Wed, 29 May 2013, Mark Green wrote:

> Yes, I do mean the non-C grades. Specifically, the csharp grade seemed
> to fail due to looking for files in the Windows execution path for the
> MingW shell rather than in the active directory within MingW. I tried
> building a new shortcut to start the MingW shell in the Mercury
> srcdist directory but so far I haven't been able to test it because of
> the long time taken to get to the csharp grade.

One of the issues here is that although you are building Mercury inside
the MSYS shell, when the Mercury compiler itself starts up an external
process via a call to system() it does  it via what ever command
interpreter the environment variable COMSPEC is pointing to; that's
typically cmd.exe**.  IIRC, the child cmd.exe instance should inherit
the environment from the MSYS shell, but it's rather picky about
how the directory paths are specified.  (In practice none of this -- or
indeed what follows -- seems to be terribly consistent between different
versions of Windows either.)

** this is not so strange, the intent of building things with MinGW
is to produce a compiler that runs natively on Windows.

One way around all this is to invoke the ``Visual Studio Command
Prompt'' shortcut (or whatever it's called, the name varies between
different versions of Windows and / or Visual Studio) and then start MSYS
from within that cmd.exe instance (i.e. run C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\msys.bat).
I think things should be okay then; provided you can correctly invoke
csc from the MSYS shell.  (I'll check this tomorrow, I don't have access
to a Windows machine at the moment.)

[We should probably have a configure test that checks that the C#
compiler can be invoked correctly via a call to system() (or whatever is
used): I'll look into adding one.]

Also, it is crucial that when specifying the installation directory for
Mercury, with configure's `--prefix' option, that it be a Windows style
path rather than a Unix style one.

> The Erlang grade fails with a file not found error when building the
> first beam file. I tried enabling verbose-commands as before; I don't
> have the log to hand right now, though.

It's probably a similar issue to the above (the same would apply to the
Java grade when building with MinGW / MSYS).

> Just to clarify I am talking about restarting an install that failed
> midway through, not one that was configured with a smaller number of
> grades. I ran configure and make with all grades enabled but make
> install failed after installing the C grades. It's really awkward if I
> really have to just sit and wait while asm_fast.gc etc are built only
> for the installer to report that all the files are unchanged and just
> delete all the work it did in the last two hours :(

Restarting the installation for a subset of grades was discussed
elsewhere in this thread.  One thing I think we can do here is
make configure do some stronger checks that everything is working
properly, *before* everything is compiled.

Cheers,
Julien.