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