Building/Binaries for Windows

[PhantomzBack]

Hi, is there anyway at present with which I can build this for windows? Or any binaries? I found this application just today and looks really enticing, considering I wanted to make such an app too. I will try to make one when I get to college, but never the less, I wish to try this out. I am on Windows 10 currently.

[flxzt]

Hi, I don't think so atm unfortunately. There are some instructions in the gtk-rs book, but I don't think anyone has tried them yet with rnote. If you are planning on building it on windows, please document the steps and share them here or in #46, maybe we could do a windows binary sometime in the future

[4bitfocus]

I came here to ask this question too… kinda. I’m looking around for a UI toolkit to use with a rust project and was considering gtk4, but have heard it is challenging to build for windows.

[flxzt]

I managed to get a first build running on windows:

I documented the steps here. I am getting lots of UTF-8 parsing errors though, so this is very experimental.

[Kreijstal]

I built it in windows as well..

First I already had mingw installed and some other dependencies so I didnt have to install as many dependencies, then

pacman -Syuu $MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX-rust $MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX-meson $MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX-gtk4 $MINGW_PACKAGE_PREFIX-libadwaita
after installing all that, simply git clone deep the submodules go to the directory.
meson setup --prefix=/usr _mesonbuild meson compile --prefix=/usr _mesonbuild
To my surprise it built!
Because I was unexperienced with how this worked, I got the error

`$ ./rnote.exe

(rnote.exe:6200): GLib-GIO-ERROR **: 11:13:31.608: Settings schema 'com.github.flxzt.rnote' is not installed

So obviously I simply copied the file to \mingw64\share\glib-2.0\schemas and used glib-compile-schemas which made it work, but thats probably not the ideal way to solve it

I would like to add some information, no I didn't install it on the system, because it gave me this error.
ERROR: File 'rnote' could not be found
I suppose because in windows, the executables are called rnote.exe and not rnote

[mjoork]

You can start executables in Windows without the extension if you have them in PATH or specify the path like ./executable.

[flxzt]

Btw. build instructions for windows are now documented here: https://github.com/flxzt/rnote/blob/main/misc/building/rnote-windows-build.md

[danzou1ge6]

Hi, I followed the steps documented in https://github.com/flxzt/rnote/blob/main/misc/building/rnote-windows-build.md, but the produced binary failed to execute: It exited with code 101 without outputing anything. What does this exit code mean? And how can I fix it?

My system is Windows 10.

Help appreciated.

[flxzt]

exit code 101 indicates that the program panicked. Try commenting out this line so that the app starts with a console and possibly run it with RUST_BACKTRACE=full to get a backtrace. You can either set the env var on windows through powershell or through code with something like: env::set_var("RUST_BACKTRACE", "full");

[danzou1ge6]

Thanks.

It turns out that rnote uses relative location ../share/rnote to access its resources, and when it's executed in a different working directory, it can't access the resources. Now I start rnote with start menu shortcut, and it's working.

By the way, is this use of relative path of special purpose, such as compatibility under Windows?

[flxzt]

yeah for portability, there will be an installer eventually which needs that

[Kneemund]

@flxzt I created a packaging script for Rnote (based on Xournal++'s CI/CD and your building documentation) which extracts all of the runtime dependencies and resources from the MSYS2 environment. It seems to work fine - I've only had issues when using the fullscreen mode, but I think that's unrelated to the packaging. There is still quite a bit of work to do if we want to create an installer, but we could distribute "portable" Windows releases as .zips for now (either manually or using GH Actions). What do you think?

EDIT: Sorry, I just realized that this is a Q&A thing. I should've probably posted that as a reply instead of a comment.

[flxzt]

Oh, that's neat. Well, I already have an inno setup installer script locally which works quite well with portable installations (as in: changing the installation path), registering the file type in the registry, working icons, .. and it would only need integration into CI/CD :)

[Kneemund]

Alright, that's even better then. Does it also extract/package the dependencies, or is that part still needed?

[flxzt]

no, not yet. it needs some manual steps before the installer script can be executed. (check matrix dm's)

[Kreijstal]

please add it to scoop :)

[Intranox]

it would be nice if this software would add some more portability by providing an executable for windows mainly but also binaries for linux. If there is a build for Windows even unstable I would be happy to try it out