livetrax/tools/windows_packaging

Building Ardour for Windows

The windows build is compiled and tested with the MinGW compiler that is
packaged in Fedora, Currently using Fedora 19. There are many cross compiled
"mingw" libraries that Ardour requires that are available on Fedora but
not all are yet.


Prerequisites

For setting up the required packages to build Ardour refer to the README
file located at https://github.com/mojofunk/fedora-mingw-ardour


Configuring

After all the necessary packages are installed the next step is to call
one of the configure scripts configure-debug.sh or configure-release.sh.

The configure-debug.sh script will enable debugging support and install
the tests to the package directory. It will also mean the GDB debugger
is packaged.

The configure-release.sh is intended for releases only, none of the tests
will be built and all the binaries will be optimized and stripped.

These scripts both source the mingw-env.sh script to setup the appropriate 
environment variables and then call waf with a specific set of parameters
that are appropriate to configure for the windows build.

There is also configure-distcc-debug.sh and configure-distcc-release.sh that
configure to use distcc for building.

Building

After the build is configured the waf.sh script is used to build the Ardour
application and all necessary libraries. The waf.sh script is not strictly
needed, it just saves having to change working directories.


Packaging

When the build is successful the package.sh script will call waf install
and then move some of the installed files to appropriate locations for a
windows executable. This could probably be done in the waf scripts specifically
for the windows build but I felt it simpler to do it in the packaging script
for now.

--------- NOTE --------------------

package_win32.sh is an updated/extended version of package.sh from Valeriy. It
should probably be merged with package.sh at some point. It uses a number of
additional resources located under mingw64/

-----------------------------------

The packaging script then copies the JACK deamon and all the required mingw
shared libraries from the host system into the packaging directory. The 
shared libraries or dll's are placed in the same directory as the Ardour
executable so they are found at runtime.

Once the package.sh script has been run then the package directory located 
in the Ardour source root directory will contain everything necessary to run
the Ardour executable.

The make-installer.sh script is only really relevant when configure-release.sh
has been used to configure the build. The script creates a basic and little
tested windows installer for Ardour using the Nullsoft Scriptable Installer
System(NSIS). 


Running

The Ardour windows binary is intended to be run and tested on windows. Testing
is mainly performed using Windows XP, but should work on Vista/7. It is only
a 32bit binary at the moment but that may change with mingw64.

The binary does not run successfully under WINE but that may change with updates
and or bug fixes.

When running Ardour for debugging purposes it is best to start the jack server
in a separate terminal(Command Prompt) before starting Ardour so that they are
not both writing to the same terminal. This will probably be fixed at some point
so when jackd is started by Ardour the output is redirected etc.

The cptovmshare.sh script will copy the package to a directory specified in the
ARDOUR_VM_SHARE_DIR for testing in a virtual machine.


Testing

When configured for debugging there are a number of test programs(prefixed with
test_) included in the package.

The tests for libpbd, libevoral and libardour can be run under wine from the
windows packaging directory using the wine-*-tests.sh scripts

Debugging

Ardour has some verbose logging/debugging output that can be useful that is used
with the -D option. 

When configured for debugging the package contains gdb along with a .gdbinit 
file to automatically set the source directory so that the "list" gdb command
will show the source code corresponding to the current stack frame.

New versions of gdb will not load a .gdbinit file unless it is located in the directory
set in the HOME environment variable and auto-load safe-path is set appropriately.

So the gdbinit_home file needs to be moved to directory set in %USERPROFILE% and
gdb started via gdb.bat for source file listing to work.

The gdb batch scripts cannot be used if the package directory is on a network share
so the package will need to be copied to a local drive first.

When starting gdb using gdb.bat the Ardour executable needs to be set as the program
to be debugged with the "file" command

e.g (gdb) file ardour-3.5.exe

You can then set a break point at main() with the "break" command as usual

e.g (gdb) break main

To set a breakpoint in a dll/shared library like libardour you need to wait for
the symbols to be loaded which only occurs once the program has been executed using
the "run" command

You can set a breakpoint at a function

e.g break `Somenamespace::somepartialsymbolname + tab to list symbols

then remove ` to set the breakpoint.

If you press tab with when there are thousands of possible matching symbols be
prepared to wait a long time(this can also cause gdb to use a lot of memory).
For this reason I prefer to set breakpoints by specifying the source file and line
number.

e.g (gdb) break audiosource.cc:976

using "catch throw" or "catch catch" can be useful to break at points where exceptions
are thrown or caught.

They are a number of glib debugging options see

http://developer.gnome.org/glib/2.30/glib-running.html

use $ set G_DEBUG=fatal_warnings to get backtrace