On Sunday, 11 March 2018 at 17:15:28 UTC, Seb wrote:
What could be done from your perspective to make the setup
easier?
(This is from the perspective of a novice programmer, who hasn't
really interacted with open source projects much)
When I first tried to compile dmd+druntime+phobos quite a while
ago, I found the information on the wiki about building on
windows[1] pretty unhelpful (in fact I never managed get all 3 to
compile properly), though that seems to have gotten a lot better
now (especially that it tells you how to structure your
directories, which from what I remember you just had to piece
together and guess from what the wiki commands were doing
originally). Luckily the two contributions I made back then
didn't require me to actually have any of that working...
As a spoiled Windows user, I like convenience, and I like things
being easy to do. For me, trying to simply build everything was a
frustrating task that took up a few days of time (reminder, this
*was* quite a bit ago before the Windows part of the wiki was
updated, and I was/still am pretty new to working on projects
that aren't my own).
One of the more frustrating yet annoyingly simple issues I was
having was that the version of Make in my PATH (GNU Make at a
guess) wasn't able to use win32.mak, which led to me getting
confused and frustrated for a day or two before I figured
out(can't remember how exactly) that I had to use Digital Mars'
make... I don't think there's any clear text on the wiki that
says "For Windows, you *need* to use Digital Mars' make to use
win32.mak".
After I changed to using Digital Mars' Make, I ran into another
annoying but very simple issue. The wiki says to use "make
-fwin32.mak release", ok fine:
```
PS D:\Coding\D\Tools\dlang\dmd2\src\dmd\src> make -fwin32.mak
release
Error: can't read makefile 'win32'
```
Turns out all I had to do was put a space between '-f' and
'win32.mak'. Thankfully I only wasted about 30mins at most
figuring that out. Didn't make it any less frustrating though.
Around the time I was adding std.traits.isCopyable to Phobos, I
thought to myself "Maybe I can at least get the testing stuff to
work!"... So I go to the wiki and see something along the lines
of "make -fposix.mak std/traits.test" and thought that win32.mak
would have the same functionality - however it doesn't, and only
has a target to unittest the entirety of Phobos, giving me the
impression Windows seems to just be a footnote compared to Posix
platforms. ('make -f win32.mak dscanner' is another example). For
isCopyable, it was easier for me to just develop it in it's own
file, move it into std.traits, and hope the auto-tester could
build it.
I think I did manage to get "make -f win32.mak unittest" (for
phobos) to work at one point, but a test that included sockets
failed (I think it was a test between paired sockets, and one of
them timed out). This of course made it feel pointless to use,
since it'd just always fail.
One last example of a very tiny issue, is that for DMD, the
makefiles you use to build it are in, for example
'dmd2/src/dmd/src/win32.mak', instead of 'dmd2/src/dmd/win32.mak'
making it a bit inconsistent with
druntime('dmd2/src/druntime/win32.mak') and
phobos('dmd2/src/phobos/win32.mak').
There were certainly a bunch more tiny issues and bumps I had
when trying to build things my first time around that I can't
remember, whether it be due to my own incompetency or due to
issues with the wiki/win32.mak, and after the two changes I made
to Phobos I just had no will to continue, and gave up for a while.
I genuinely feel it'd have been easier for me to just load up
Ubuntu on a VM and go from there, instead of developing on
Windows.
One thing I'd would have liked, as a Windows/lazy user, and as a
beginner, is a single file/tool that would've helped me setup and
build everything (like that setup.sh you linked, except it's a
Bash script...)
And in a perfect world, we wouldn't need 3 different makefiles
(win32.mak, win64.mak, and posix.mak), but instead there'd either
be a single makefile, or some other tool is used to provide a
cross-platform way to access the current features of posix.mak. I
understand that this isn't an easy issue to solve though, hence
the "in a perfect world" (you could also say, in a perfect world,
everyone develops on a Posix platform! ;)).
Then I recently gathered up the will to want to contribute again,
and decided to make a Powershell script that does exactly that
for me which actually turned out to work pretty well, I can build
all 3 projects without too much hassle, and without having to
remember all those annoying pitfalls e.g. "-f win32.mak instead
of -fwin32.mak", something I would've liked to have in the first
place. Or so I thought.
I wanted to try and add some colouring[2] to dmd's error messages
(sounds easy enough right?), so I have a quick look and see all I
need to do is add some backticks around certain parts of the
error message[3, as an example]. So I add my backticks into one
error I can easily trigger, build it using my powershell script,
and then all I see is that an exception (I think it was actually
a RangeError) was thrown, and the stack trace was just a bunch of
addresses without any text. (I don't have that build of dmd.exe
anymore, and most of dmd has been colourised by now, so I can't
get an accurate copy-paste of what happened or try to reproduce
it.)
I decided "that's not supposed to happen", and tried to colourise
a few other error messages... but I got the exact same result. I
try to take an already coloursised error message, copy and paste
it to another file, and try again to no avail.
At that point I decided that it's probably yet another issue with
my build environment that I'll have to try an work out, but if I
can't even get something 'trivial' such as colouring in messages
working without frustration, then I can't be bothered to put in
any more effort with trying to do anything else (I'd rather not
be stuck only being able to do documentation changes), since, at
least in my experience, I'm probably just too inexperienced, and
I just keep hitting road blocks and endless frustrations.
I have a lot of free time, and I have a lot of love for this
language, but when I struggle to get _anything_ to work (and also
struggle to find something I'm actually capable of trying to do,
I find Bugzilla a bit hard to use) then it makes me demotivated.
Maybe I'm missing something, maybe I'm just an idiot, maybe the
wiki is incorrect, etc. There's clearly _something_ wrong with
what I'm doing, but I can't bring myself to try and figure out
what anymore (I say that, but I know full well I'll shortly want
to try again, and again, and again, until I can finally help out
with dlang ;( ). I'd like to note that the process of submitting
the PRs didn't make me run into any issue (though, the changes
were really simple, so I doubt there was much room for something
to stop them)
This post may not be all that helpful, but I feel the need to
voice the frustrations with my experience. Sorry for the
pointless/off-topic rant.
[1] https://wiki.dlang.org/Building_under_Windows
[2] https://github.com/dlang/dmd/projects/2
[3] https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/7781/files
