Windows can't build Hello World example about node-gyp

[TooTallNate]

Hey @arturadib, so except for the last one, these are more or less expected:

Problem 1

At first node-gyp seems to look for a bindings.gyp file rather than binding.gyp:

Yes this is actually expected, and arguably a usability bug in node-gyp. But basically the Windows target generates a <name of gyp file>.sln, whereas the Make target generates a (hard-coded predictable name) Makefile.gyp file. I've been meaning to change Windows to glob for the first .sln file in the cwd but haven't done that yet. (You can currently specify which sln to use with node-gyp build --solution=binding.sln, but ideally you don't need that).

Problem 2

If I rename binding.gyp to bindings.gyp then it seems to build OK, except for a warning message concerning a mismatch of extensions (.dll vs .node):

This is also expected. Node renames the resulting shared object to .node rather than .dll. MSVC decides to complain about that. Not sure if there's a way to silence that warning..

Problem 3

Since the build was seemingly OK, I tried to run test.js, but it complains that there is no binary in ./out/Release/binding. Instead, the binary was produced in ./Release/binding.

Again, this is just a Windows-ism of the build system. The same thing happens when building node.exe itself! There is never an out directory, just top level Debug and Release. This also may be fixable (in the node repo), but I'm not sure really. Note that node-bindings takes care of normalizing that for you at runtime.

Problem 4

Fixing the path issue above and running test.js again now leads to the following error:

node.js:201
       throw e; // process.nextTick error, or 'error' event on first tick
             ^
Error: unknown error

"unknown error", lovely :
I haven't actually ever seen that one yet! Are you trying out the 64-bit node.exe or something? I doubt it's related to the .dll vs .node thing. I'll fire up my Windows VM in a bit to verify that the Hello World addon builds properly...

[TooTallNate]

So Problem #4 is fixed by nodejs/node-v0.x-archive#2828.

I'll open a new issue to glob for .sln files on Windows, so that the --solution argument is not necessary.

Closing.

[TooTallNate]

@arturadib Check out nodejs/node-v0.x-archive#2833 which fixes Windows to build addons properly in the out dir. Cheers!

[arturadib]

@TooTallNate Awesome, thanks Nate. I was actually going to ask you about those random files scattered around root :)

I suppose this feature will not work when the user has older versions of Node installed, right? (Since as I understand it, node-gyp will download the corresponding minor version source, which won't have the new features in yet).

[TooTallNate]

@arturadib You're correct about node-gyp downloading the source tarball, however node-gyp also copies over newer versions of the gyp config files when they exist from its "legacy" dir. Eventually this "fixing" hopefully won't be necessary, and node-gyp can just use the node version's gypi files as they come, but for now (at least until 0.8) node-gyp has to do some "cleanup" on the dev files.