Looking at LibreOffice's Windows installer

There has long been a desire to get rid of Cygwin as a build dependency on LibreOffice. In addition to building dependencies it is also used to create the Windows MSI installer. Due to reasons I don't remember any more I chose to look into replacing just that bit with some modern tooling. This is the tragedy that followed.

The first step to replacing something old is to determine what and how the old system works. Given that it is an installer one would expect it to use WiX, NSIS or maybe even some less know installer tool. But of course you already guessed that's not going to be the case. After sufficient amounts of digging you can discover that the installer is invoked by this (1600+ line) Perl script. It imports 50+ other internal Perl modules. This is not going to be a fun day.

Eventually you stumble upon this file and uncover the nasty truth. The installer works by manually building a CAB file with makecab.exe and Perl. Or, at least, that is what I think it does. With Perl you can never be sure. It might even be dead code that someone forgot to delete. So I asked from my LO acquaintances if that is how it actually works. The answer? "Nobody knows. It came from somewhere and was hooked to the build and nobody has touched it since."

When the going gets tough, the tough starts compiling dependencies from scratch

In order to see if that is actually what is happening, we need to to be able to run it and see what it does. For that we need to first compile LO. This is surprisingly simple, there is a script that does almost all of the gnarly bits needed to set up the environment. So then you just run it? Of course you don't.

When you start the build, first things seem to work fine, but then one of the dependencies misdetects the build environment as mingw rather than cygwin and then promptly fails to build. Web searching finds this email thread which says that the issue has been fixed. It is not.

I don't even have mingw installed on this machine.

It still detects the environment as mingw.

Then I uninstalled win-git and everything that could possibly be interpreted as mingw.

It still detects the environment as mingw.

Then I edited the master Makefile to pass an explicit environment flag to the subproject's configure invocation.

It still detects the environment as mingw.

Yes, I did delete all cached state I could think of between each step. It did not help.

I tried everything I could and eventually had to give up. I could not make LO compile on Windows. Back to the old drawing board.

When unzipping kills your machine

What I actually wanted to test was to build the source code, take the output directory and then pass that to the msicreator program that converts standalone directories to MSI installers using WiX. This is difficult to do if you can't even generate the output files in the first place. But there is a way to cheat.

We can take the existing LO installer, tell the Windows installer to just extract the files in a standalone directory and then use that as the input data. So then I did the extraction and it crashed Windows hard. It brought up the crash screen and the bottom half of it had garbled graphics. Which is an impressive achievement for what is effectively the same operation as unpacking a zip file. Then it did it again. The third time I had my phone camera ready to take a picture but that time it succeeded. Obviously.

After fixing a few bugs in msireator and the like I could eventually build my own LibreOffice installer. I don't know if it is functionally equivalent but at least most of the work should be there. So, assuming that you can do the equivalent of DESTDIR=/foo make install with LO on Windows then you should be able to replace the unmaintained multi-thousand line Perlthulhu with msicreator and something like this:

{

    "upgrade_guid": "SOME-GUID-HERE",

    "version": "7.4.0",

    "product_name": "LibreOffice",

    "manufacturer": "LibreOffice something something",

    "name": "LibreOffice",

    "name_base": "libreoffice",

    "comments": "This is a comment.",

    "installdir": "printerdir",

    "license_file": "license.rtf",

    "need_msvcrt": true,

    "parts": [

        {

         "id": "MainProgram",

         "title": "The Program",

         "description": "The main program",

         "absent": "disallow",

         "staged_dir": "destdir"

        }

    ]

}

In practice it probably won't be this simple, because it never is.