Possibility of supporting Windows

[lawrence-c]

Would it be possible to support installation to Windows hosts? Or a suggestion if you have an idea / best way of doing this?

[toshitanian]

@surferL its been long since i worked on this project last.
im glad if you make a PR

[lawrence-c]

Sure, I can take a look. Would you have any suggestions on best way of doing this?

I've had a quick look so far, and you can download Windows executable which installs for you, but requires user interaction... Would you know a way around that in Ansible?

Conversely, just install from source...

[toshitanian]

@surferL

Let me organise some.

Is installation procedure below correct? I think this will install boost on windows after you download the archive.

# unzip archive
> unzip boost_1_65_1.zip
# move to directory
> cd (extracted_dir)
# bootstrap
> bootstrap.bat
# install boost
> b2.exe install -j2

If so, you just write this script in tasks/main.yml for windows. (Unfortunately, I don't know much about ansible for window.)

Then, the problem is, how to download the archive, as you mentioned. And I found that the zip archive is available from https://dl.bintray.com/boostorg/release/1.65.1/source/boost_1_65_1.zip (for 1.65.1). found download link in the top of download page .

I think you can use this link to download zip. You can check defaults/main.yml to know how I generate download url based on boost version :)

[lawrence-c]

I'll have a look tomorrow, but that does look promising! :)

[lawrence-c]

There's a slight issue where win_unzip is extremely slow and takes around 10 minutes to unzip the boost.zip. This solution does seem to work, but would require Powershell 5 to also be installed / or upgraded on the windows machine...

Would that be okay as a requirement? Or just keep using win_unzip?

[toshitanian]

I don't know much about windows culture, but it seems that upgrading Power Shell is not kind to user.
How about using power-shell solution if power-shell-5 or greater is installed, and If not installed use win_unzip?
there would be a way in ansible to check if power-shell is install/what the version is.
you can check the condition and choose the tasks.

[lawrence-c]

Sounds good. Another pre-requisite of building from source is requiring vcbuildtools, which can be installed with chocolatey (but can do another check to see if it is installed first, before installing it?)

[toshitanian]

you are probably able to check if some dependencies like vcbuildtools is installed.
It might be good to use fail module when dependencies are missing.
You can let uses to know what to do install before running ansible playbook :)