On 11 September 2011 23:42, Peter Odding
<peter@peterodding.com> wrote:
About Windows (and in a similar matter OSX), it would be nice to have
precompiled binaries. But does it need to be Mike to do that? As an
OpenSource project anyone can stand up and cater for this.
In fact, a couple of us have done this at the past; I vaguely remember
doing so myself and I think Ignacio also. Somebody should undertake
to do this systematically and track the repo.
After reading your message yesterday I played around a bit with the idea of a build bot for creating Windows binaries* of popular Lua projects. I had the following considerations in mind while coming up with a solution:
* I've had bad experiences with cross compilation so want to build Windows binaries on a Windows system using the Microsoft toolchain;
* I don't have any Windows installations available, although I've had good experiences running Windows in VirtualBox;
* I want to be able to run the build bot from a cron job so that the supported projects are automatically rebuilt and made available once in a while.
After some hacking I now have a build bot that automatically finds, downloads, unpacks, builds, packs and uploads the latest Lua 5.1, LuaJIT 1 and LuaJIT 2 releases. The build bot uses VirtualBox to run a headless virtual machine with Windows XP and the Windows Platform SDK installed.
Right now I have to run the build bot manually but I plan to install it on one of my servers later this week. I've read that VirtualBox doesn't require X for headless operation so this should be a simple matter of installing VirtualBox on the server, copying over the VM image and setting up the cron job.
For more information about the project and links to generated binary downloads see either of the following pages:
* http://peterodding.com/code/lua/buildbot
* http://github.com/xolox/lua-buildbot
The build bot code is licensed under the MIT license and the readme includes the following disclaimers:
* The license only applies to the build bot itself — I don't have any affiliation with the projects supported by the build bot, I'm just a happy user;
* Should the original authors have objections against this build bot, let me know and I will remove support for the project in question;
* I don't give any guarantees as to the published binaries. They're generated in a dedicated virtual machine so it's very unlikely that a virus could sneak in, but you never know until you've scanned the binaries yourself...
I hope someone finds this useful. If you have any questions or comments feel free to reply here or in a private message.
- Peter Odding
* I don't have access to a Mac, but if someone is willing to install the build bot on their Mac I can see about getting the build bot to produce Mac binaries as well.
--
Tai Chi Minh Ralph Eastwood
