This a major pain that has been brought up in #107 and #108 most recently, but earliest attempts date have existed. Basically building on windows is an immensely painful process. I believed to have documented this already somewhere but it appears not, so I’m creating an issue to track progress on this. I haven’t looked at this in 6 months so I’m taking a look at things to see if they got un-stuck.

The core issues are:

• Pympress depends on gtk3 and poppler, which we need to either build or obtain in binary form, and redistribute.
• Distributing a python package as binary requires freezing it, from which we use cx_Freeze (though other alternatives

Basically the 2 main paths to build pympress for windows are either using Linux toolchains on Windows (i.e. MinGW/Msys and the related) or Microsoft toolchains (i.e. MSVC). Those are not compatible. So a system’s Python for Windows is the latter, while a python installed inside msys2 for example is the former.

The current/legacy technique relies on PyGObjectWin32, which uses the Microsoft way, with all of the packages pre-compiled, so it’s a rather pain-free mechanism. However this seems to be unmaintained and rather outdated by now. Also I do not particularly wish to boot an old machine up or have to keep a 32bit and 64bit python 3.4 on a Windows VM, this really does not scale.

Testing all of this via appveyor scripts or RDP is very slow, however this is as far as I’ve gotten along both paths:

1. Going the msys2 way gives a functional pympress, so msys2 is currently the best way to install pympress on a windows system, but we can’t use it (yet?) to build installers automatically.

   • most (all?) dependencies are pre-compiled and distributed as “wheels” over pip. All install without problems.
   • The cx_Freeze package (and any other freezing package I tried) requires compilation, as no wheel is (was?) available, and this breaks. The cx_Freeze package’s current master (marcelotduarte/cx_Freeze@29ed764) can be installed from source using pip successfully.
   • The correct list of things (typically DLLs) to be included in the frozen package needs to be adjusted.
     The following warning message is also slightly worrying:

     *** WARNING *** unable to create version resource
     install pywin32 extensions first

2. Going the MSVC way, we have to compile everything. Gtk 3 and cx_Freeze both work after some tweaking, but I can’t manage to get or install Poppler.

   • Gtk can be obtained from the gvsbuild project
   • From this you can then build pygobject and pycairo and test applications using Gtk seem to work
   • I’ve managed to install poppler from conda-forge, however the typelib (the bindings needed for the introspection) seem to be missing. So from gi.repository import Poppler breaks. Maybe by getting the recipe and building poppler ourselves with that recipe we could add the typelib?
   • cx_Freeze’s current master (marcelotduarte/cx_Freeze@29ed764) can be installed, but I have not tested its functionality