[publican-list] What's the status of publican on Windows?

[Jeff Fearn]

Hi Mark,

On 08/14/2012 09:10 AM, Mark Miesfeld wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 3:42 PM, Jeff Fearn<jfearn at redhat.com>  wrote:
>> On 08/14/2012 12:31 AM, Mark Miesfeld wrote:
>>>
>>> One of the things that interested me about publican was the presence
>>> of a Windows installer.  It would be convenient for me to be able to
>>> work on Windows, rather than having to boot into a Linux system
>>> whenever I needed to work on our documentation.
>>>
>>> But, when I installed publican, I see that the publican.exe is dated
>>> 2009.
>>
>> https://fedorahosted.org/releases/p/u/publican/Publican-Installer-2.3.exe is
>> from Nov 2010.
>
> Thanks for the reply.  Sorry about that.  I saw that when I went back
> to look more closely.  I think I had just assumed that
> Publican-installer.exe was the latest version.
>
>>>   And it won't run on my Windows 7 system.
>>
>> Can you tell us why?
>
> It was missing a MsCRT DLL.  But I ran the 2.3 installer and saw the
> missing DLL was included.  So that is probably fixed.
>
> Unfortunately, the Publican-Installer-2.3.exe tries to download some
> ImageMagic files during the install and for whatever reason the
> estimated time to finish was over an hour.  I was too impatient and
> quit.  I'll try again later tonight.

FYI this has been removed for 3.0.

>>> So, I'm guessing there is really not much support for running publican
>>> on Windows.  Is that true, or am I missing something?
>>
>>
>> It's quite an effort to get it working and we receive very little feed back
>> about it so it's not a priority. Publican 3.0 is around the corner and I do
>> hope to have a Windows installer for that. I have access to Vista and Win7
>> so hopefully I can get it working on both.
>
> Is it just the installer you are having problems with, or is it the
> Windows .exe itself?

The installer is easy, it uses NSIS, but making a perl program in to a 
standalone exe is a tricky process and it can get frustrating.

I have recently switched from using Active State Perl to using 
Strawberry Perl ... we'll soon see if that is easier or not :)

> Thanks again for the reply.  It is good to know that there will at
> least an effort to get 3.0 working on Windows. I thought maybe the
> Windows effort was abandoned.

Not abandoned ... just under appreciated ;)

Cheers, Jeff.

-- 
Jeff Fearn <jfearn at redhat.com>
Acting Supervisor
Infrastructure Engineering & Development (AEU)
Red Hat Asia Pacific Pty Ltd
GPG: 0x0357E8F0