Add Windows support for the Makefile

[faboweb]

Commit: 9d1b348

• build does not output .exe files on Windows
• back tick syntax for executing git rev-parse --short HEAD does not work on Windows
• rm -rf does not work on Windows

[NodeGuy]

This bug is back:

C:\Users\david\go\src\github.com\cosmos\cosmos-sdk>make get_vendor_deps
process_begin: CreateProcess(NULL, rm -rf vendor/, ...) failed.
make (e=2): The system cannot find the file specified.
make: *** [get_vendor_deps] Error 2

[nylira]

Can be this resolved permanently if we add building the SDK as a CircleCI job?

[faboweb]

Building the SDK should not rely on the CI. Every dev should be able to build the SDK no matter the OS.
This error was actually fixed before but was lost along the way. Windows has no rm command so there needs to be an OS switch for removing the vendor folder. I guess we want rd /s /q "path" on Windows: https://ss64.com/nt/rd.html

[zramsay]

what happened to Bash for Windows? It came out a couple years go, should be stable by now? Why not require it as a pre-req ?

[rigelrozanski]

I thought we made the choice not to support windows? >;-)

[zramsay]

where was that choice documented?, and if it wasn't then it should be added to README that windows isn't supported

[cwgoes]

If we want to support Windows, can we add Windows to the CI (that doesn't mean relying on the CI, just using CI to ensure we don't accidentally break Windows builds)?

cc @greg-szabo

[greg-szabo]

We need to support windows for the sake of the UI. I'm pretty confident that the UI will be used on Windows by a lot of people and the UI is dependent on gaiad. Ergo Windows build is necessary.
I'd propose a build-windows target, instead of trying to make our targets compatible with all OSes. This way you can keep using Linux/OSX commands which we also use during development.

Edit: it might require a parallel target for get_tools and get_vendor_deps too.

[cwgoes]

make build_windows sounds good, separate tools targets are fine if necessary, or maybe the existing targets could autodetect the platform. According to the CircleCI FAQ, they do not yet support Windows, so we may need to set up a separate CI provider - unless we can cross-compile for Windows on Linux?

[faboweb]

I think we should have a Windows and Mac (maybe not as everyone is using Macs anyway) environment test on CI to be sure we don't break anything.
Windows CI: https://www.appveyor.com/

[jackzampolin]

We are developing a CI/CD system to build and sign binaries for launch. This will include Windows output. We are tracking that work with the SRE team. Closing this issue.