How to make a binary release of Angband 4.1.0

[10v24]

I made a kind of variant of Angband 4.1.0 (see 10v24.net/ang) a few years ago and never made a Windows binary of it. Now I have a Windows 8.1 computer and have installed msys2 and so on, and want to make a Windows binary that people can download.

In ./configure, there are three options for installation: shared scorefile (like on old fashioned Unix server), private directory, and "with no install". Each option sets a different path or paths for game data, etc. From the output of ./configure, it looks like the path is always to something particular to my computer. Is there a graceful way to have it have a relative path, so that it would work wherever the user installed it? I assume that when the developers make a binary for distribution, they have some way to make it work that way.

[backwardsEric]

Does running this in the top-level directory,

./configure --enable-win --disable-curses --disable-x11
make
cp src/angband.exe .
cp src/win/dll/*.dll .
scripts/pkg_win name_you_want_for_release_here

, work within the MSYS2 environment? That's intended to build the Win32 front end. The Win32 front end sets the paths to be the directory where the executable is plus "\lib" and does not use the DEFAULT_LIB_PATH, DEFAULT_CONFIG_PATH, and DEFAULT_DATA_PATH preprocessor macros set by the configure script (or src/config.h if not using that script).

[fph]

If you use git, the fastest way to a Windows release might be copying Vanilla's github workflows to cross-compile to Windows.

[Nick]

IIRC the simple way to compile on Windows is

cd src
MINGW=yes make -f Makefile.win

which leaves you with a binary in the src directory.

Then doing

cd ..
cp src/angband.exe .
cp src/win/dll/*.dll .
scripts/pkg_win name_you_want_for_release_here

as in Eric's solution should do the packaging.

[10v24]

Thanks for the advice. I now have the problem that when I compile, ld.exe says that some things in mon-blows.h are multiply defined, as though mon-blows.h is included multiple times, perhaps, and this prevents linking from completing. I do see that mon-blows.h includes monster.h, which includes mon-blows.h, which is circular, but this shouldn't be a problem since conditional compilation is used. I have successfully compiled this project in Linux, so I'm guessing maybe there's some difference between the preprocessor (or linker?) in my Linux gcc and my MingW.

I'm wondering if I supplied the right flag to MingW, that would fix it (something like std=c99? which is already set by default).

[backwardsEric]

That's a problem from Angband 4.1.0, which you'd also see if compiling 4.1.0 on versions of Linux from the past 3 years or so (certainly happens with Debian 11 and its packaged versions of gcc and ld). See https://github.com/angband/angband/c...106f679b7845c2 for the fix: modify src/mon-blows.h to add extern to the declarations for blow_methods and blow_effects.

[10v24]

Okay, thanks everyone for the advice, I got it to compile finally, and packaged.