I'm working on a pure x64 version of my software. Our installer for the x86 version is NSIS and my software is built using VS2012. I found online that in order to build x64 installers using NSIS you have to build NSIS (and all plugins/etc) from source. That is the end goal. However, right now I'm having issues just building x86 (before moving on to x64) using the instructions in the NSIS docs. https://nsis.sourceforge.io/Docs/AppendixG.html#build_windows
I'm trying to build NSIS v3.0.4 which uses SCons to build. I've installed scons using pip (SCons version 3.1.1).
However, when trying to build NSIS, I get the following (using python 3.8.0).
C:\Source\nsis\nsis-code-r7069-NSIS-tags-v304>scons ZLIB_W32=C:\Source\zlib-1.2.7 MSTOOLKIT=yes
scons: Reading SConscript files ...
TypeError: cannot use a string pattern on a bytes-like object:
File "C:\Source\nsis\nsis-code-r7069-NSIS-tags-v304\SConstruct", line 263:
for v in re.compile(r'^\\H\{[v]?(\S+)\}', re.M).finditer(File('#/Docs/src/history.but').get_contents()): # Try to parse the Halibut history file
the section of the SConstruct file is as follows (starting at line 260 so the for loop starts at 263):
if not defenv.has_key('VER_PACKED'):
import re
found = None
for v in re.compile(r'^\\H\{[v]?(\S+)\}', re.M).finditer(File('#/Docs/src/history.but').get_contents()): # Try to parse the Halibut history file
if v and not found:
v = v.group(1).split('.')
if len(v) >= 2:
mi = int(re.search(r'\d+', v[1]).group())
if mi < 1: mi = 1 # Make sure we can subtract 1 from the minor number so trunk stays below the next release
defenv['VER_PACKED'] = '0x%0.2i%0.3i%0.2i%0.1i' % (int(re.search(r'\d+', v[0]).group()), mi - 1, 66, 6)
if int(defenv['VER_PACKED'], 0) >= int('0x03000000', 0):
found = v
if not found:
defenv['VER_PACKED'] = '0x%0.2i%0.3i%0.2i%0.1i' % (3, 3, 42, 0) # Default to a version number we never used
print('WARNING: VER_PACKED not set, defaulting to %s!' % defenv['VER_PACKED'])
At this point, I'm not sure if there is a dependency I'm missing or if this is an issue with the build script and needs to be reported at the NSIS issue tracker. Ideas?
-UPDATE 1-
Based on suggestions from @Anders, first I tried to build the head of the repo (r7132 trunk) instead of v3.0.4 using Python3. This got me farther but still failed on what appears to be Python2 vs 3 syntax errors in mstoolkit.py (might be a symptom of another issue rather than the cause though). I didn't investigate this too much further yet.
So next, I went back to Python 2.7. This got me further but the mstoolkit.py appears to be dependent on VS2003 implementation. I duplicated the VCToolkitInstallDir environment variable on my machine using the contents of the VS110COMNTOOLS (C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\Tools) but that fails also:
File "C:\Source\IQClient_Interim\Shared\third_party\nsis\nsis-code-r7132-NSIS-tags-v304\SCons\Tools\mstoolkit.py", line 87, in get_msvctoolkit_paths
raise SCons.Errors.InternalError, "The Platform SDK directory was not found in the registry or in the `MSSdk` environment variable."
InternalError: The Platform SDK directory was not found in the registry or in the `MSSdk` environment variable.
I don't know what the VS2003 VCToolkitInstallDir ENVVAR was pointing to to fix this.
With all that said, I just noticed that Anders said that I might also have to use an older version of scons as well with python2.7 so I suppose I'll spend some time investigating that (along with looking into @bdbaddog's solution).
-UPDATE 2- it was the mstoolkit directive (see @Anders answer's comments) I got it working after that while using py 2.7 for NSIS 3.0.4.
Now on to x64 build but that's a different story so I'll post a different question.
