Windows distribution & installer

Background

Currently we can build using MSYS2 by installing: pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-toolchain base-devel mingw-w64-x86_64-gtk2 meson

Note: It seems the default meson doesn't work (not sure why). So I simply remove it: pacman -R meson and then download the git version: https://github.com/mesonbuild/meson/releases/tag/0.49.0 It is still important to install it first via pacman as that brings in it's dependencies (such as ninja).

Then the standard (as per documentation):

../meson/meson.py builddir --prefix=`pwd`/builddir/local_install
cd builddir && ninja install

# Then you can either:
./local_install/bin/dia
./run_with_dia_env app/dia

The point is that it compiles and works. The challenge then is how to distribute it?

What has been attempted

Building via Visual Studio 2017 and nmake

There are a few *.msc files. I believe these are for nmake, which belongs to VS. I tried running nmake makefile.msc from source root directory but got an error regarding missing glib. This was traced to the inclusion from dia-make.msc and removed from there. Then, attempting to run nmake makefile.msc again I got errors for missing intl.h and object.h

...
        cl  /c aadl.c aadlbox.c aadlbus.c aadldata.c aadldevice.c aadlmemory.c aadlpackage.c aadlport.c aadlprocess.c aadlprocessor.c aadlsubprogram.c aadlsystem.c aadltext.c aadlthread.c aadlthreadgroup.c edit_port_declaration.c
Microsoft (R) C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 19.16.27025.1 for x86
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

aadl.c
aadl.c(26): fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'object.h': No such file or directory
aadlbox.c
c:\msys64\home\eduard\dia\objects\aadl\aadl.h(30): fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'intl.h': No such file or directory
aadlbus.c

...

Building via Visual Studio and meson

https://mesonbuild.com/Using-with-Visual-Studio.html

However this also errors out with missing gtk+2.0 (not sure how to install it from VS):

C:\msys64\home\Eduard\dia>python ..\meson\meson.py --backend=vs2017 builddir-vs10
The Meson build system
Version: 0.49.0
Source dir: C:\msys64\home\Eduard\dia
Build dir: C:\msys64\home\Eduard\dia\builddir-vs10
Build type: native build
Project name: dia
Project version: 0.97.3+git
Native C compiler: cl (msvc 19.16.27025.1)
Native C++ compiler: cl (msvc 19.16.27025.1)
Build machine cpu family: x86
Build machine cpu: x86
Found Pkg-config: NO
Found CMake: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2017\Community\Common7\IDE\CommonExtensions\Microsoft\CMake\CMake\bin\cmake.EXE (3.12.18081601-MSVC_2)
Dependency gtk+-2.0 found: NO (tried cmake)

meson.build:13:0: ERROR:  Pkg-config not found.

A full log can be found at C:\msys64\home\Eduard\dia\builddir-vs10\meson-logs\meson-log.txt

C:\msys64\home\Eduard\dia>

Manually packaging files build in MSYS2

Dia can be run without installing to a local prefix, or using the run_with_dia_env script by either changing the PATH or by moving it to the same location as libdia.dll (i.e. lib/).

The problem then is that if attempted to be ran from outside of MINGW64 environment, Windows will not find the MSYS libraries. As such, they need to be copied to lib/.

However after copying all libraries I get the following:

Reverse engineering existing installer

The existing installer can be extracted using 7zip. We can then view all contained files - note that the bin/ directory has all required .dlls.

Unfortunately these are different libraries and simply replacing dia.exe and dia.dll didn't work.

Other alternatives

Figuring it out from scratch

https://blogs.gnome.org/nacho/2014/08/01/how-to-build-your-gtk-application-on-windows/

Looking at what other projects do

This seems promising: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Compiling_Inkscape_on_Windows_with_MSYS2

Inkscape uses MSYS2 but they also build .exe (NSIS) and .msi installers.

Got it to compile (had to disable NLS: cmake -G Ninja .. -DENABLE_NLS=0 -DWITH_NLS=0). ninja install installs all dependencies. Can we make meson install dependencies as well?