Locker on Windows?!
Thomas Muldowney
Ok, not quiet, but getting closer.
With the move to node v0.6 I wanted to see if we were any closer to running the lockerd on windows. Installing node and npm was trivial with the installer package from the node website. I got the locker code base and using msys went into the directory and ran npm install. Almost immediately I ran into problems. It turns out the installer does not include node-waf or any of the mandatory libraries to link compiled modules. BUMMER!
There's a pull request open on node's github with the parts included, but the core team has decided to move away from waf overall and towards a newer project called gyp. It appears to be a CMake like system that prefers to generate system build scripts rather than do the building itself. I took a short exploration into trying to compile node myself on windows, but didn't want to spend the time and energy that it was quickly adding up to.
So, with some prodding from jer, I decided to install all of the pure node modules that I could and see if I could at least get the locker to run. I got all of the modules, that I could, pulled together fairly easily, but actually running it was another story. We have TONS of poorly constructed paths that should be using path.join() to make sure we pick a platform appropriate directory separator. I cleaned up a fair deal of them to get to the point where I could get that screenshot. I even tried connecting Twitter and it did talk to the remote service, but the processing ran into more poorly constructed paths and failed.
All in all, I think we'll be able to move forward very rapidly to the windows platform, in the future. From reading some node development threads related to the issues I was running into we shouldn't really be targeting this until 0.7/0.8 versions of node. Right now it's not worth the overall investment, but I do think we can start as many of the core cleanups as possible, such as path.join() and erasing as many platform assumptions as possible.
--temas