Windows status

[servantftechnicolor]

Hello,

Is there some place to find information on rez for windows ?

I see various very old discussions and PRs.

I tried on my computer and it doesn't work as is (not finding nmake even using the vs command line).

Is there something working somewhere ? Are there some planned release ?

Thanks

Fabien

[instinct-vfx]

Hey Fabien,

rez does work and support Windows. There are some gotchas on Windows and Documentation is not necessarily reflecting these properly as of yet.

Particularly handling Paths and Environment Variables can be tricky with rez. That can be very unintuitive but has good reasons. Could you explain in a bit more detail what you want to achieve, what you tried and how it failed?

Cheers,
Thorsten

[servantftechnicolor]

please see below

[servantftechnicolor]

I tried to make something as simple as possible :

CMAKE_MINIMUM_REQUIRED(VERSION 2.8)

include(RezBuild)
include(ExternalProject)

set(url_eigen https://gitlab.com/libeigen/eigen.git)
set(tag_eigen 3.4)


ExternalProject_add(
    eigen
    GIT_REPOSITORY url_eigen
    GIT_TAG tag_eigen
    PREFIX eigen
    CMAKE_ARGS -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=${CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX}
)

`name = "eigen"

version = "3.4"

authors = [
]

description = \
    """
    """

variants = [
]

tools = [
]

uuid = "repository.eigen"


def commands():
    pass

    if building:
        pass

[Jawabiscuit]

Hi @servantftechnicolor, I made msvc and vs when I encountered the same roadblocks on Windows. Those issues manifest from the fact that rez doesn't come with batteries included to build cmake projects. You need visual studio and cmake to be available in the rez environment and it seems on Windows, at least for the time being, the way to get those in the environment is for them to be provided by packages.

The msvc (14.16) package is essentially the same as vs (15) with the only major differences being the former provides just the basic build tools and the latter additionally provides devenv UI. This is so that you can have a smaller package if you only intend to use the package for it's building capability (msvc) and not it's interactive debugging capability (vs), among other less significant things.

These packages only provide the bare minimum of build tools to compile C++ using nmake, cl, etc..., and provide the built-in cmake. The installer, for whichever package you might choose, you must download yourself from the Microsoft website. Shortcut link is included in the README. They use pwsh to build so that should be the only requirement.

Maybe if you're up to the task, you could give any one of those packages a try. I've had much success using them to build practically all my projects, Python or C++. I love how simple it is to build Python projects especially. When you have downloaded and built a package, just include it as one of your private_build_requires in the package you wish to build with cmake and you should be off to the races!

[instinct-vfx]

The reason rez-build does not output this is because cmake is a plugin, and rez build only outputs help for itself. Would be nice to have build systems support custom help definitely though. You can use rez -i to output a list of all plugins, that also includes build systems.

[Jawabiscuit]

Good to know, thanks. As you said, it seems imperative to me that they'd also output their help to the terminal. It is a plugin, but it feels like it's part of rez. If I recall, there's impetus to split plugins off into separate repos though? That usage of rez i is also unintuitive in my opinion. Maybe a --list-plugins would be better?

[ColinKennedy]

Normally for plug-in CLI things, I'd split it as a separate subparser. e.g. rez-build -ci would do its regular build logic but if provided a positional, rez-build cmake --help --other-args it'd show the cmake plugin's help. And rez-build --help would show all available subparser names. Seems like that'd maintain backwards compatibility

[instinct-vfx]

I am not so sure about sub-parsers vs. parameters. Need to think about that some more

[Jawabiscuit]

Hi @servantftechnicolor, I made msvc and vs when I encountered the same roadblocks on Windows. Those issues manifest from the fact that rez doesn't come with batteries included to build cmake projects. You need visual studio and cmake to be available in the rez environment and it seems on Windows, at least for the time being, the way to get those in the environment is for them to be provided by packages.

In efforts to make this information more accessible to new Windows users and to set the record straight, I wanted to report at long last I was able to reprise my effort in finding a simpler solution for using cmake on Windows with a fresh install of rez. I figured out one way is to make simple rez packages for cmake and make and override the child build system for cmake (thanks to hints provided in this discussion) and change it to make. That isn't the end of the story, but it was were I left off a while back. For whatever reason on Linux I've never had to do this, but then again I never set it up from scratch on Linux, but also setting project(foo_project NONE) in CMakeLists.txt tells cmake the project isn't compiled. I knew that since diving into cmake a while back but have been out of the practice since you don't need to use project for rez packages.

To recap:

• It isn't absolutely necessary to include a Visual Studio in the environment, as a package or otherwise, as I had been as a workaround unless your project is compiled.
• Create and build packages for cmake and make.
  • Alternative tools that preclude the necessity for making packages exist in rez, but in the long-run you might experience undesireable solves: parent_variables, all_parent_variables, setenv, unsetenv
• Include project(foo_project, NONE) near the top of CMakeLists.txt
• Execute rez-build --bs make and optionally include -ic at the end

That's it!

P.S. I'm in the process of updating packages I've shared for cmake and make for Windows. The make package I'm sharing requires better support for gitbash on Windows. Hopefully this PR makes that a reality. 🙏

[nerdvegas]

The thing is though, there's no help to show for the cmake plugin (for eg) beyond cmake's own help. Rez is just allowing you to pass args as a passthrough.

…

On Fri, 22 Apr 2022, 22:41 Jonas Avrin, ***@***.***> wrote: Good to know, thanks. As you said, it seems imperative to me that they'd also output their help to the terminal. It is a plugin, but it feels like it's part of rez. If I recall, there's impetus to split plugins off into separate repos though? That usage of rez i is also unintuitive in my opinion. Maybe a --list-plugins would be better? — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1288 (reply in thread)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAMOUSW2HRYB7RLAK52FTHDVGKM6BANCNFSM5TYCEZRA> . You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[instinct-vfx]

That's a good point, but not necessarily true for all plugins, and i think there would be value in supporting plugin help to be presented at the respective rez commands. That said it feels like this might be a 3.x topic.