These are some notes on the steps involved in making up a wxMSW distribution from a CVS hierarchy. Currently only Julian Smart does this, but in the event of the duty being transferred, or to allow people to produce custom distributions, the following may be helpful.

The distribution scripts are in the distrib/msw directory.

Requirements

1. A wxWindows hierarchy from CVS.
2. A copy of Tex2RTF in your path.
3. 32-bit zip and unzip utilities. I use zip 2.0.1 by Mark Adler and others, and unzip 5.12 by Info-ZIP. I call them zip32 and unzip32 in the scripts.
4. Adobe Acrobat to generate the PDF documentation.
5. The scripts use 4DOS, so you will need a copy (the evaluation copy should do).
6. Several Windows compilers to test out the distribution (see below). VC++ is assumed, for running some of the scripts, e.g. the makefile for running Tex2RTF.
7. To make the setup.exe version of the distribution, a copy of WISE Installer (I use version 5.0: I don't know if the scripts are compatible with other versions).
8. If you need to extract the top and bottom from the wxWindows WISE script after editing it with WISE (so that the distribution script can automatically rebuild the .wse script from the distribution files + .wse script top and bottom), you will need to compile distrib/msw/splitwise.cpp into distrib/msw/splitwise.exe, a DOS command line program.
9. UPX, for compressing executables.
10. A lot of disk space.

Steps

1. Compile utils/projgen if necessary and run, to generate the .dsp/.dsw files for the samples, demos and utils using VC++ 5/6. In fact when wxWindows is fairly stable and new samples haven't been added and settings changed, this step isn't necessary.

2. Update version numbers:
   • Ensure include/wx/version.h specifies the correct wxWindows version.
   • Alter WXVERSION or other version-related variables in src/makevc.env, src/makeg95.env, src/makeb32.env.
   • Alter the DLL version in the VC++ project files using distrib/msw/vcupdate.bat (no arguments).
   • Edit distrib/msw/zipdist.bat and change the version variable to the appropriate version.
   • Edit the WISE script (normally distrib/msw/wisetop.txt) to change the version number. See also below for other WISE script changes.
   • Update the date and version number in docs/latex/wx/manual.tex.

3. Check setup.h is correct for the distribution (e.g. wxUSE_ODBC = 1, wxUSE_UNICODE = 0, etc.).

4. Regenerate makefiles from the tmake templates, if necessary. Most makefiles have a target to do this using the makefile name, or else 'self'. Or you can use the 'makeall.bat' script in distrib\msw\tmake.

5. Using VC++ 6, make a WIN32 release executable of Dialog Editor and place it in the top-level bin directory in your CVS hierarchy. Similarly for Tex2RTF and Life!. Compress them with UPX to save space.

6. Ensure that the library and most of the samples/demos compile for the popular compilers. Currently I check with the following compilers:

   VC++ 1.5, VC++ 4.0, VC++ 5.0, VC++ 6.0 (static and DLL), BC++ 4.5 (WIN16/WIN32), BC++ 5.0 (WIN16/WIN32), C++Builder 3, Watcom C++ 10.6, Cygwin b20, Mingw32 2.95. For VC++ 6 and BC++ 5.0, check compilation using both the makefiles and the project files (wxvc.dsp, wxvc_dll.dsp, bc32.ide). See distrib/msw/makeall.bat for a script to build wxWindows and samples for a variety of compilers.

7. Ensure that all .rsp files, that list the files to go in the distribution, are up-to-date. For example, samples or demos may have been added to the hierarchy. The same applies to projgen (see above).

8. Likewise, ensure that vc.rsp contains references to all the sample project files (that have been generated by projgen).

9. Ensure docs/msw/install.txt is up-to-date (detail any gotchas for particular compiler versions, etc.).

10. Update docs/readme.txt, docs/changes.txt (summarize from CVS change notifications).

11. Build the WinHelp, HTML, and PDF documentation via the VC++ makefile, src/msw/makefile.vc. You can use e.g. the targets cleandocs alldocs. Check the output of the Windows Help Compiler for missing links, and edit/recompile the docs if necessary. The PDF documentation is produced from the Word RTF document, and read into Word. Apply the wxManual Style Template to improve presentation (Format|Style Gallery...). Select all, press F9 to reformat the fields. Check the table of contents for overspill from the body of a section into the TOC. If there's a problem, it's due to the lack of a blank line at the end of the relevant .tex file. Insert the blank line, regenerate the RTF, and reload into Word. Then use Adobe Distiller to generate the PDF.

12. You need to edit the WISE script to change the version number, and any other changes you wish to make. For simple changes, you can edit distrib/msw/wisetop.txt directly with a text editor. If you wish to use WISE Installer directly, you will need to make a full wxwin2.wse file first, by: (a) making up the distribution (next step), (b) editing wxwin2.wse with WISE Installer, (c) running the distrib/msw/splitwise program to produce wisetop.txt, wisebott.txt, (d) executing the next step again to remake the distribution programatically (or just run WISE directly: but remember to run splitwise to be in sync for future reference). For more details, please see distrib/msw/readme.txt.

13. Make a deliver directory in the top-level wxWin hierarchy, change directory to distrib\msw, and run zipdist wise (omit 'wise' if you don't want to build the setup.exe files).

14. You should now have lots of .zip files in your deliver folder, some setup.* files, plus a wx hierarchy (extracted from the zips) that you can now delete.

15. Test the setup.exe distribution by installing it, preferably compiling using several compilers e.g. using distrib\msw\makeall.bat.

16. Go into Linux, unpack the distribution zip files, then call the Linux distribution script to create .tgz files for wxMotif.

17. Upload the appropriate files to the SourceGear ftp site.

18. Download Robert's wxGTK files and upload to the SourceGear ftp site.

19. Update the web site front page, news, download and CD-ROM pages to reflect the new version.

20. If updating the CD-ROM hierarchy as well, follow these steps using the CD-ROM makefile:
    1. Edit WXDISTDIR in the makefile and change to the correct distribution directory for this version.
    2. Run the makefile with copydist. This copies the distribution to the correct place on the CD-ROM.
    3. Run the makefile with copydocs. This copies the wxWindows 2 manuals to the correct place on the CD-ROM.
    4. Copy any project file zips that didn't need updating from an old distribution, e.g. wxWindows-x.y.z-wat.zip.
    5. Copy Robert's wxGTK files to the directory by hand.