Building Ardour for Windows

The windows build is compiled and tested with the MinGW compiler that is
packaged in Fedora, Currently using Fedora 16. There are many cross compiled
"mingw" libraries that Ardour requires that are also available on Fedora but
not all are yet.


Prerequisites

Follow instructions in Fedora-16.txt to build and/or install the required
packages.


Configuring

After all the necessary packages are installed the next step is to call
one of the configure scripts configure-debug.sh or configure-release.sh.

The configure-debug.sh script will enable debugging support and install
the tests to the package directory. It will also mean the GDB debugger
is packaged.

The configure-release.sh is intended for releases only, none of the tests
will be built and all the binaries will be optimized and stripped.

These scripts both source the mingw-env.sh script to setup the appropriate 
environment variables and then call waf with a specific set of parameters
that are appropriate to configure for the windows build.


Building

After the build is configured the waf.sh script is used to build the Ardour
application and all necessary libraries. The waf.sh script is not strictly
needed, it just saves having to change working directories.


Packaging

When the build is successful the package.sh script will call waf install
and then move some of the installed files to appropriate locations for a
windows executable. This could probably be done in the waf scripts specifically
for the windows build but I felt it simpler to do it in the packaging script
for now.

The packaging script then copies the JACK deamon and all the required mingw
shared libraries from the host system into the packaging directory. The 
shared libraries or dll's are placed in the same directory as the Ardour
executable so they are found at runtime.

Once the package.sh script has been run then the package directory located 
in the Ardour source root directory will contain everything necessary to run
the Ardour executable.

The make-installer.sh script is only really relevant when configure-release.sh
has been used to configure the build. The script creates a basic and little
tested windows installer for Ardour using the Nullsoft Scriptable Installer
System(NSIS). 


Running

The Ardour windows binary is intended to be run and tested on windows. Testing
is mainly performed using Windows XP, but should work on Vista/7. It is only
a 32bit binary at the moment but that may change with mingw64.

The binary does not run successfully under WINE but that may change with updates
and or bug fixes.

When running Ardour for debugging purposes it is best to start the jack server
in a separate terminal(Command Prompt) before starting Ardour so that they are
not both writing to the same terminal. This will probably be fixed at some point
so when jackd is started by Ardour the output is redirected etc.

The cptovm.sh and startvm.sh scripts are intended for testing Ardour in a 
Windows XP virt image and may need to be altered to be used successfully.


Testing

When configured for debugging there are a number of test programs(prefixed with
test_) included in the package.


Debugging

Ardour has some verbose logging/debugging output that can be useful that is used
with the -D option. 

When configured for debugging the package contains gdb along with a .gdbinit 
file to automatically set the source directory so that the "list" gdb command
will show the source code corresponding to the current stack frame.

Use break `Somenamespace::somepartialsymbolname + tab to list symbols, then remove 
` to set break. If you press tab with when there are thousands of possible
matching symbols be prepared to wait a long time(this can also cause gdb to use a
lot of memory).

For reasons I've yet to determine many symbols are not accessible so the best way
to set a breakpoint is by using filename and line number.

e.g (gdb) break audiosource.cc:976

but this seems to only work after running Ardour at least once.

They are a number of glib debugging options see

http://developer.gnome.org/glib/2.30/glib-running.html

use $ set G_DEBUG=fatal_warnings to get backtrace