Windows Support

So far support for Windows has been, at most, an after thought for me. I own only one rather old windows box that I use for the occasional gaming. For that reason, windows just isn't a big priority. However, after a discussion with Martin Logan we came to the conclusion that sinan will need to support windows from the initial release. Fortunately, I have used the filename and filelib modules through out the implementation. That should remove any path name issues between the two systems. Unfortunately, I use symlinks pretty heavily through out the build. I have also used two very unix specific os commands as part of development, uname and tar. At first I thought that replacing these commands would pose a big problem. That proves not to be the case as the stdlib and kernel applications provide for my needs, though that functionality is pretty well hidden.

To figure out what platform and architecture I am on I use uname. I need this to pull down the correct version of binary dependencies from the repository. I didn't see any real solution to replace this command. I finally ran across a reference to erlang:system_info(system_architecture). This should solve my needs pretty well. Unfortunately, it only works in R9 and above. So, as you would expect, its a trade off. If I use this I can make the system work in windows but not in pre R9 systems. I think the right choice is to make it work in windows. Hopefully a pre R9 solution will present itself.

I also thought tar would present more of a problem as tar isn't a windows command. There is an erl_tar module in stdlib but it claims to support only Sun's version of tar. However, on examination of the docs for both erl_tar and gnutar this seems not to be the case. The format followed by erl_tar is IEEE Std 1003.1. This is an extended version of tar called ustar and its a POSIX standard. It seems that modern versions of gnutar support IEEE Std 1003.1 as well, as you can see here (check the references at the bottom of the page). So the erlang docs seem either in accurate or out of date, fortunately for me.

Symlinks are a bit of a harder problem. The need for symlinks is greatly reduced now that I don't have to build up tar-able structures. However, I still use them to build up a deployable version of the OTP apps with sources in the _build directory. I think that the only solution to this problem is to copy the sources and related files into the binary structures instead of symlinking them in. It will add a bit of overhead but I think thats worth it.

I do have one final problem, this one just occurred to me. I have written a nice little shell script to kick off a build. This shell script uses a bit of magic (borrowed from firefox) to follow any symlinks back to its deployed area where it gathers the paths for sinan. It then kicks off erl with all the proper paths to the sinan code. Not being a windows person I have no idea how to handle this on windows boxes. Hopefully, some erlang oriented windows guy will step forward and help me out with this.