Qt portable version for Windows

[MikeDuk]

Would it be possible/feasible to create a portable version for the Qt client and publish it at https://www.freeciv.org/download.html?

Just a zipfile to uncompress all contents into a folder and play from there.

I know a portable version for the GTK client can be found at Portableapps.com.

Thanks.

[cazfi]

Just a zipfile to uncompress all contents into a folder and play from there.

Our installer isn't doing anything much more than extracting their content to the destination directory, so this sounds doable. Maybe as a byproduct of the full installer build (once we have all the content in a directory, create also a .zip of it, in addition to putting it to the final installer)

[cazfi]

One thing I should be able to do quickly is starting to upload intermediate zips (actually: .7z) of the nightly installer_cross builds again. We used to do that, but they seemed to only confuse people, with nobody actually needing them.

viewtopic.php?t=91989

The caveats:
- They are based on installer_cross, not msys2 environment. They are functional, but might have some rough edges - it's up to users to decide how big an issue this is
- The freeciv .7z contains only stuff from actual freeciv build. You also need the crosser environment (another .7z). There's a couple of ways to either merge the directory trees (to extract freeciv .7z inside the tree extracted from crosser .7z), or to use them in parallel.

[cazfi]

One thing I should be able to do quickly is starting to upload intermediate zips (actually: .7z) of the nightly installer_cross builds again.

Sorry it took so long, but I've now enabled that, a couple of hours ago. Seems like nightly build of freeciv-3.1 already picked the change: https://files.freeciv.org/nightly/S3_1/ ... /portable/ There has been no new freeciv-3.0 build this night, as the freeciv code has not changed (only the nightly build scripts)

[MikeDuk]

What would I need to execute it on Windows? The crosser pack? Does it contain the DLLs that are missing when I execute a Qt6 version from https://files.freeciv.org/nightly/S3_1/ ... /portable/?

Thank you.

[cazfi]

What would I need to execute it on Windows? The crosser pack? Does it contain the DLLs that are missing when I execute a Qt6 version from https://files.freeciv.org/nightly/S3_1/ ... /portable/?

Yes, crosser pack matching the build. That's crosser-2.5 at the moment, but expected to change to crosser-2.6 very soon (maybe even today -> before build coming night). (osdn #47665)

As for actually using them together, there are some instructions at https://sourceforge.net/p/crosser/wiki/ ... 20freeciv/ , but it has been many years since I last used that particular method myself -> it may need adjustments to work with current crosser and freeciv versions.

[cazfi]

One thing I should be able to do quickly is starting to upload intermediate zips (actually: .7z) of the nightly installer_cross builds again.

To go beyond "quick hacks", I think we can provide proper support in freeciv-3.2, with some things backported to freeciv-3.1. The main thing here is that I'd rather invest my time to make it work on meson based builds (-> in the future) than on autotools based solution that Windows builds still use in freeciv-3.1.

[MikeDuk]

Thank you, cazfi.

[cazfi]

First step towards this is getting 7z to the msys2 environment we use for building. There's now new environment version with that addition in review: osdn #48218. I expect things to do progress quickly now on, despite summer vacations, and that 3.2 and 3.3 snapshot builds will have portable versions included starting within a month.

[cazfi]

The main ticket: osdn #48408 (osdn is currently having issues, so the link might not open)