Confused newbie question: from local copy to Dreamhack (Windows)

[ninetydegrees]

In http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Beginning_dev_checklist, it is said that "you can download the files from your Dreamhack to your local machine, edit them, and then re-upload them."

How? I'm on Windows so I cloned the dw-free repo with Tortoise then edited the file locally. I also have Putty and a Dreamhack. I don't know how to 're-upload the file' I've changed or the patch I've made to my Dreamhack to be able to test it.

Sorry if this has been covered in the Wiki. I couldn't find it.

A: use WinSCP.

Comments

[av8rmike]

Are you running an actual Dreamhack, or just cloning the repository?

[ninetydegrees]

I don't really know what you mean by 'running an actual Dreamhack'. I requested one and set it up as explained in the welcome e-mail and http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Beginning_dev_checklist/http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Dreamhack_Getting_Started. Then I edited some files to test my patches. I also cloned the dw-free repo via Tortoise as I explained in my entry.

[av8rmike]

Pretty much what you just said. It won't help you much now, but I've been working on a tutorial that explains how to work on styles bugs without the (unnecessarily complicated) step of running a Dreamhack. The stumbling block is that we don't have any sort of "Advanced Customization Area User's Manual", and I don't want to have to explain every step of editing layers/styles in detail.

[ninetydegrees]

I guess you mean http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Working_on_a_Styles_Bug? I've read it but, as I said to Afuna somewhere, it wasn't really helpful to me because it doesn't explain things for newbies using Windows so I had to bug Afuna, who kind of asked around for help.
Well, running a Dreamhack became necessary for me as I wanted to get my fixes and themes committed sooner rather than later and thought it unfair to expect Afuna and Wyn to do all the tedious work for me. The whole process's not that complicated, I think: what's complicated is the number of software one has to use if you're on Windows and the fact that all the info is spread out on different pages and is sometimes a bit lost among a lot of other info which is not essential to a beginner/someone working on styles. However, I think it's a good idea to teach people to become less dependent and to encourage them to go one step further so I'm working on a newbie guide for Windows people.

[av8rmike]

Yes, that's the one, and I recognize that it's pretty bare-bones at the moment. I actually did all of the early Core2 and layout work on my Windows PC with TortoiseHG, but that was back when the "S2 team" had its own Mercurial repository to which we could send our commits. I just realized afterward that yes, working on a Windows PC is going to be more complicated because it doesn't have a lot of the tools that are just there when you're using Ubuntu.

If you want to expand the Wiki page to include steps from your newbie guide, please feel free. That's the whole point of posting it on the Wiki: so it could be a living draft. And, don't hesitate to contact me to ask for help or just to bounce ideas off me.

[yvi]

Hmmm, I am wondering if there is a kind of 'Linux Wine', meaning a mini-Linux you can just run in a window in Windows, just like I sometimes run Windows under Linux using wine. I know Knoppix, but you have to restart to run it.

[av8rmike]

There's Cygwin, but I haven't tried working with it. I didn't see any reason it wouldn't be possible to stay entirely within either Windows or Linux.

[hypatia]

I can think of a couple of ways of doing this:

* the Wubi installer for Ubuntu, which installs Linux into an image in your Windows partition. Does require a full reboot; doesn't require futzing around with partitions. Just about indistinguishable from a "regular" Ubuntu install.

* Virtualbox + a Linux VM. Virtualbox is free virtualization software, and you can download pre-made VMs for most flavours of Linux. Heck, we could roll our own, made for DW development :) This would be a fair bit slower than Wubi or a regular install, probably around 70% of the speed?

I just found this thing called portable ubuntu which runs entirely inside windows and looks totally badass. No idea how slow it is but it sure looks like the easiest thing.

[ninetydegrees]

This is what I've got for now: http://experiment.dreamwidth.org/9596.html It's far from being complete, of course.

I have a question for you. I think it would be nice to let people know they can stop at some key points: let's say I've edited the file but not made the patch or made the patch but not tested it. Would you guys appreciate even getting this rather than nothing?