Windows configure "issues"

[Kelly O'Hair]

A voice from the past rings out through the forests of repositories, squirting ancient wisdom into the clouds... ;^)
Yes, yes, I have indeed gone insane. ;^)

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The intent with the README-build.html document was as a purely "OpenJDK" document,
there should be no "Oracle specific" instructions in it, that is the wrong place for it.
Inside Oracle, there is another README-builds.html file that will refer to the OpenJDK one and
provide additional Oracle specific information. The Oracle build people know where that is.

Historically, I have tried in the past to only contain the kind of information that would help
any user needing to build the OpenJDK. It might be that a wiki would be a better place, but at the
time I created this file, keeping it in the repository made the most sense. So I tried to isolate all
the information in this document (we had no wiki at that time).
Anyone changing this document needs to be very careful, and know what they are doing, and
being in a repository, requiring a bug id, and a reviewer, seemed to be the right level of control.

My suggestion at this time, now that there is a wiki, would be to get this document down to the
bare bones (so to speak), and have the wiki page provide details,
e.g. "You need Visual Studio 2010, see wiki for details."
So that changes to the wiki can be made quickly and as needed, but someone still needs to make sure
the basic information is correct in this README-builds.html file, or get rid of it completely.
Having the same detailed information in two places seems like a bad idea to me.

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I'll crawl back under my new job rock now, hope this provided some insight.

-kto

On May 21, 2013, at 8:55 AM, Volker Simonis wrote:

> On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 12:43 PM, David Chase <david.r.chase at oracle.com>wrote:
> 
>> I saw that and tried that, but it declared that "you must be Administrator
>> to install this".  I thought I was, I as installing all sorts of other
>> software, but no go.  I found your instructions, but they weren't
>> Oracle-sourced instructions, so it seemed like it was not my problem.
> 
> 
> Sometimes "Oracle-sourced instructions" simply aren't the "silver bullet" :)
> 
> This will hopefully change now that we have a usable Wiki. I always felt
> that having the build instructions checked in into the repository is
> somewhat to heavyweight. It should only contain a general build overview
> and link into the OpenJDK Wiki which can be updated more easily and more
> frequently and it can contain all the different peculiarities of each build
> platform (i.e. not only the few "official" Oracle ones).
> 
> 
>> This is not just a matter of "I'm blocked, please help me", this is also
>> "anyone out there trying to follow these instructions will fail, we must
>> fix this".
>> 
>> On 2013-05-21, at 4:38 AM, Volker Simonis <volker.simonis at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>> 
>>> As you noticed, Visual Studio Express only contains the 32-bit Compiler.
>> You have to download and install the "Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET
>> Framework 4" from
>> http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=8279 to get the
>> 64-bit compiler (this will also install the IA64 cross compiler just in
>> case your keen on a real adventure:)
>>> 
>>> Regards,
>>> Volker
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 3:04 PM, David Chase <david.r.chase at oracle.com>
>> wrote:
>>> In addition, the instructions must note that if the Express compiler is
>> used, the 64-bit compiler is (apparently, according to configure) not
>> provided, and hence --with-target-bits=32 is required.
>>> 
>>> David
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>>