Subj : Build instructions for Windows
To   : Digital Man
From : Nightfox
Date : Fri Jul 23 2021 02:00 pm

Hi DM,

Recently I've tried building the Synchronet binaries for Windows using Visual Studio (for debugging purposes), and I imagine some things may have changed since the last time I built the binaries, a while ago.  I had to do a couple things to get things to build (and still, a few of the projects are still failing to build), and I didn't see information on these steps on the wiki (though they may be there and I didn't see them).  I wanted to share in case anyone might find this information useful.

I was following a page on the wiki for debugging Synchronet with Visual Studio:
https://wiki.synchro.net/howto:msvc
One thing is that the wiki mentions using Visual Studio 2019.  I found that I was getting errors saying the v141_xp toolkit was missing.  It seems the v141 build tools are available through the Visual Studio 2019 Community installer, but it seems specifically the v141 XP tools have been deprecated and removed.  In order to install the v141_xp tools, I had to also install Visual Studio 2017 Community and enable the XP build tools during the install.

Also, while building, Visual Studio reported gitinfo.bat was returning with error code 255.  I found gitinfo.bat was trying to run tr (the GNU translate tool), and I didn't have that installed for Windows.  I downloaded the GNU Core utils for Windows here & installed that, which solved that issue:
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/coreutils.htm

After that, still just 3 of  the projects failed to build.  VS reports build errors for sbbs, textgen, delfiles, and upgrade_to_v319.  The errors are all from text.h regarding a missing #endif, and when I checked text.h, it's incomplete - The last line is "enum :":

/* text.h */

/* Synchronet static text string constants */

/****************************************************************************/
/* Macros for elements of the array of pointers (text[]) to static text*/
/* Auto-generated from CTRL\TEXT.DAT*/
/****************************************************************************/

#ifndef _TEXT_H
#define _TEXT_H

enum {


I seem to remember seeing something a while ago that generates text.h, but I don't remember what it was now.


What I'd like to do is to build the debug binaries for Windows and attach the VS debugger to the sbbsctrl process, because I'm still finding that Synchronet tends to crash every so often on my setup (requiring a program to perodically check to see whether sbbsctrl.exe is running, and re-start it if it's not).

Nightfox

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