-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 13/09/10 21:15, Alon Bar-Lev wrote: > On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 8:25 PM, Peter Stuge <pe...@stuge.se> wrote: >> autotools is absolutely alien in Windows, and to be honest a bit of a >> hassle to set up if you're already a VS wizard. > > In OpenVPN upstream provides binaries using mingw anyway. > So there is no need to support any other environment for Windows. > This makes it easy. > Also, please keep in mind that OpenVPN is not a library... so much > easier to manage. > >>> and the mixture of different projects: openvpn, tap, windows >>> installer, easy-rsa. >> >> How can the installer situation be improved? I want to make an NSIS >> installer as well, and I would quite like to keep it *within* the > > I just saying that most users do not interested in compiling the tap > driver, also compiling the tap driver requires Microsoft DDK. So > separating the tap into its own release management would be wise... a > separate MSI for the TAP that can be embedded within other installers. > > Easy-rsa has nothing to do with openvpn, it is great that it is > provided, but as a separate process, fix in easy-rsa should not modify > openvpn release > > The same for Windows installer, a fix in Windows installer should not > modify openvpn version, as it has nothing to do with it.
Alon, I completely agree with you! And I think this is going to bite us harder in the future if we don't begin to think about alternatives. So thank you for brining this up! - From my point of view, it makes not much sense to provide building support for other Windows platforms than mingw for the OpenVPN binary. And I do share your opinion about the TAP driver, as well as easy-rsa and Windows installer. Another issue which has bitten us lately is also that we needed to release a new OpenVPN *version* because the build scripts changed, which meant increasing the version number. In this case, we should normally just need to update a build number on Windows and not the complete OpenVPN release version for all platforms. How things are now, we even need to update the OpenVPN version number if we only update the Windows TAP driver, which is relevant for only one platform. My suggestion is that we first move those parts related to the Windows TAP driver, Windows installer and easy-rsa into separate git trees. Next, the Windows building scripts needs to be split up, so that there's a separate building process for Windows TAP driver and the OpenVPN binary. As those processes *are* different, it should actually simplify the building process in the long run. Then we need to come up with a better Windows installer process, which f.ex. can require a pre-compiled TAP and OpenVPN binary. This way, it can also be easier for people creating installers for Mac OSX as well, maybe even other platforms which uses their own installers. For those wanting to pull down everything in one go ... we can always look into git submodule, which can pull down several separate git trees in a few operations. This might be useful for the Windows installer, especially to include the easy-rsa files. The time frame I imagine for this is when OpenVPN 2.2 is released. That's a reasonable time to think this through and we need to do some other improvements to the git tree when we release OpenVPN 2.2. As a side-note, I hope we will be able to get 2.2 released within this year. Alon, when it comes to your patch, I've looked at it, and it looks sane to me. But as I'm neither a Windows developer nor an autotools expert, I'll wait for an ACK from someone who can understand it better. But I'll try to remember to bring it up on Thursday's developments meeting, unless someone ACKs it earlier. kind regards, David Sommerseth -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkyWFYoACgkQDC186MBRfrrZKQCfbZIH4kLB/lFLO/CVdbTxRT3f iXAAmQGl+sndowcQlqXXwDzK4Wv/xEI9 =mvMe -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
