[tahoe-dev] unable to build on Windows Re: tahoe-dev Digest, Vol 37, Issue 23

Zooko O'Whielacronx zookog at gmail.com
Mon Apr 26 06:09:54 UTC 2010


On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 11:25 PM, Matthew Reinbold
<matthew.reinbold at voxpopdesign.com> wrote:
>
> First time poster. I came upon the Tahoe project a couple of weeks ago and
> thought it would be an ideal fit for sharing sensitive documents via the
> distributed company I run.

Welcome! Thank you for the bug report!

> I'm on Windows XP and am current with all updates. I followed the setup
> instructions for Windows found here (however, I used the latest versions for
> all available items rather than the specific version numbers):
> http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe-lafs/trunk/docs/quickstart.html

So, you chose the latest versions of Python, pywin32, and Tahoe-LAFS,
right? What versions of those three did you get, and were there any
other version choices that you made?

> After downloading and unzipping all items I attempted to run:
> python setup.py build
>
> That downloaded several "eggs" (not familiar with Python) but seemed to fail
> with the error "Unable to find vcvarsall.bat".

I think this means that (a) there is a dependency which is not present
in eggy form for your CPU architecture, operating system, and version
of Python, and (b) the fallback attempt to build that dependency from
source also failed. Let's find out which dependency it was. Please
send the entire output from the call to "python setup.py build" which
ended with that error.

See, the Tahoe-LAFS setup.cfg file [1] has this URL in it:

http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/deps/tahoe-dep-eggs/

At that URL the build system will try to find eggs of all the
dependencies. (It will also look elsewhere, starting from the Python
Package Index -- http://pypi.python.org .)

I *think* that what went wrong was that some dependency is missing
from that list for your platform and version of Python.

> Further Googling turned up detailed, expanded number of configuration
> details:
> http://www.mail-archive.com/tahoe-dev@allmydata.org/msg01587.html
>
> Following that, however, I seemed to have regressed. The error I now get:
...
> ConfigParser.MissingSectionHeaderError: File contains no section headers.
> file: C:\Python2-6-2\lib\distutils\distutils.cfg, line: 1
> '{{{\n'
>
> Did I do something wrong to copy and paste the contents of the distutils.cfg
> shown on that final web page?

Yes you copied and pasted it wrong. If you are following those
instructions from that mailing list message in order to build
dependencies yourself from source, then your distutils.cfg file should
have just the two lines "[build]" and "compiler=mingw32", without the
"{{{" or the "}}}"

However, as explained above, you shouldn't "have to" build
dependencies yourself from source, and I would like to understand why
your build processes are going down that path.

>  The page is from last summer - is there an
> easy way of getting Tahoe running on a Windows machine?

The easiest way is to get some nice Windows hacker to provide prebuilt
eggs of all the dependencies for you. The second easiest way is to
configure your system to use a C/C++ compiler so that it will build
eggs of the dependencies from source. (And hey, if you do it that way
maybe you could share the resulting eggs so that the next person to
come along can do it the easiest way. :-))

In any case, please send us the entire output from the build which
ended with "Unable to find vcvarsall.bat" so that we can figure out
what went wrong.

> One of the biggest needs is to have the install process as simple as
> possible if I am going to get the principals on board to using Tahoe. If
> installation on a Linux based system that much easier would it make sense to
> create a VM with Tahoe already installed and just have them run that image
> on their machine in something like Virtual Box?

It is very easy to install Tahoe-LAFS on Ubuntu, because you just do
"sudo apt-get install tahoe-lafs". However, whether running it inside
a virtual machine would serve your needs depends on what you need to
do with it.

Regards,

Zooko

[1] http://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/browser/setup.cfg



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