We use Jenkins to build our applications. You can have Jenkins slaves
for different platforms. We also use cabal-dev to sandbox the builds,
separating the environments for different executables. This solution
does require one server for every OS you develop for, but I guess you
need that anyway, for testing.
Erik
On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 11:43 AM, Ivan Perez
Hi, I work developing multi-platform applications in Haskell. This poses the following problem: I cannot compile binaries for windows from linux (AFAIK). I "solved" this problem with the following sledgehammer: I installed windows in a VM, I installed GHC, I installed all the C/C++ headers & binaries of the libraries that I use (Gtk, OpenGL, SDL, OpenCV, etc.) their Haskell counterparts, and I created several scripts that connect to the VM using SSH, push the changes to the repo, cabal clean & cabal install all my packages in sequence without me having to even login into the windows machine. I did this because I was unable to get GHC to run properly in Wine at that time (over 2 years ago).
This solution is still unsatisfactory because: 1) It's slow, even though Windows itself works fine (well, as well as windows can work, but it runs at a decent spped, I can play games and all). 2) When I update a library with lots of dependencies, or GHC itself, I have to rebuild almost everything. This is particularly painful with big packages like Gtk, for instance. Because I have to tell cabal where headers and libraries are located, updating a package is almost never an automatic process. I haven't always been able to make GHC "just pick them up" properly with pkg-config. 3) When I make a change in a library with lots of dependencies, recompiling all the packages can take several hours.
I don't think it's a problem with my machine: I'm giving a fair amount of resources to windows, and I use a 3Ghz quadcore with 8GB of RAM.
Another relevant fact is: I use this for commercial purposes. I have customers, each requiring a completely different program, they do not have infinite budgets and, if there's a problem in the compilation process and something requires my attention and manual intervention too often, my salary per hour can easily drop to a ridiculous amount. If I'm going to redo this, I'd rather just redo it once.
Any suggestions? How do you solve this kind of problem in your work environment?
Cheers, Ivan
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