"build" standalone on windows

pobrien86

So, I would like to get a 2.1.x build of zotero running as standalone rather than the current 2.1a3 which is several months old.

I tried just copying all the files from my firefox 4 zotero extension folder to the zotero standalone programs folder, but this did not work so well.

Are there some files I should exclude when doing this? I was hoping zotero.exe would just run the new zotero.jar and not care that it changed.

ajlyon

See http://www.zotero.org/support/dev/client_coding/building_the_standalone_client -- but the instructions may need to be updated, and those instructions are probably too Linux-centric to be very useful for you in Windows.

Hopefully the team will come out with Standalone trunk builds, like the trunk and 2.1 branch XPIs available for standard Zotero.

pobrien86

so specifically when I try to run 2.1.6 with xulrunner 2.0rc1, I get:

XML Parsing Error: undefined entity
Location: chrome://zotero/content/standalone.xul
Line Number 23, Column 1:<window id="main-window"

which indicates some other error is happening as "<" being undefined is non-sensical.

pobrien86

Well, new strategy, I downloaded an ubuntu virtualbox image and ran build_sa. Got it to build fine for linux and windows. Have not done error testing yet, but the program opens and seems to work.

Would not recommend the bash script linked above. Steps are:
0. apt-get curl, perl, bash, subversion
1. make a build directory
2. get build_sa from https://www.zotero.org/trac/browser/standalone/trunk/build_sa
3. Download xulrunner 2.0 for your architecture http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/xulrunner/releases/2.0/runtimes/
4. slightly tricky part: make an "xulrunner" subdirectory in your build directory. Then extract the xulrunner archive file to this subdirectory. You will have {build dir}/xulrunner/xulrunner/{a bunch of files/folders}. You now need to rename the 2nd xulrunner subdirectory to xulrunner_{arch} where {arch} is linux-i686, linux-x86_64, or win32. so you should have {build dir}/xulrunner/xulrunner_win32/{a bunch of files/folders} for windows builds.
this is simply how the build_sa script is setup to find xulrunner.

5. select the build(s) you want by editing the first few lines of build_sa.
6. chmod u+x build_sa (not sure if it's necessary)
7. execute: sudo ./build_sa

note that build_sa will try to build linux i686 and x86_64, if you don't have both xulrunners it will print a harmless error.

pobrien86

next step would be, instead of pulling from the trunk to pull from the 2.1 branch and try to get a 2.1.6 equivalent, as it's widely used/tested and seems to make sense to keep sync'd that way for sanity.

ajlyon

Thanks for the progress updates-- please feel free to update the wiki. It'd be fun if you could make unofficial binaries for the trunk and 2.1 branch available for download-- it looks like the standalone alphas are on a pretty infrequent release cycle, and there are things I'd like to test out in SA from time to time, but not enough to want to make builds.

pobrien86

https://www.sugarsync.com/share/b7y87f8nz3873

I'll put any builds I make there (highly recommend sugarsync!). I have the latest win32 SVN in there now. I'm going to build a 2.1 branch in the near future.

ajlyon

I think the 2.1 branch should be good enough here-- while you could try to match the tagged 2.1.x releases with standalone versions (and there's little downside to doing so), the drivers have been pretty conservative about branch commits, and the 2.1 branch is certainly stable enough for alpha testers, and probably stable enough for most users.

Thanks for making this-- I may hack something together to autobuild and host on my server, since it looks like this is pretty simple to do (given proper instructions).

Simon

I've added some (incomplete) instructions on how to do a build under Windows using Cygwin here.