[Buildbot-devel] Windows specific tips for buildbot

[Timothee Besset]

I started setting up some build slaves in Windows platforms and hitting
a few road blocks. I found little information on the website and mailing
list archive about operating buildbot on Windows. Let me list a number
of problems I have:

=== How do you create build steps for Visual Studio?
This should be a simple matter of calling devenv.exe with the
appropriate parameters, so I'm doing something like that:

s( step.ShellCommand, command=
r'"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio
8\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" /build "Debug|Win32" /out build.log' )

which doesn't quite work:

'\"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe\"' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.

What's the proper way of escaping the path?

=== Compiling from command line with Visual Studio doesn't output to
stdout, but to a log file.
That's the /out build.log part
-> how to have that print out progressively as the build goes?

=== Running the slave as a service?

It's the absolute suck to have to have a session opened with
"buildbot.bat start-slave ." running. I was looking at getting things
running as a service, but didn't find much information? Some of the docs
point to using srvany.exe and such, but I haven't found a download from
Microsoft with those tools ( Resource Kit ) that works on 64 bit platforms?

There.. hope I can grab some bits of information from the various issues
there..

TTimo