winstrap feedback

[jay]

I'm using winstrap-2015-02-11-046f2a8.exe in a clean Windows 7 x64 VM.

The TDM link doesn't work, the file contains 404 Not Found.
2016/03/24 17:31:42 Downladed tdm-gcc-4.9.2.exe (52 bytes) to desktop

Also winstrap expects C:\TDM-GCC-64\bin for me so I'm pretty sure the tdm64 installer is needed. I used tdm64-gcc-5.1.0-2.exe and it seemed to work fine. I don't have a C:\TDM-GCC-32

After I ran the git installer it said:
2016/03/24 17:55:37 This program will now check out go. Type 'go' to proceed.
2016/03/24 17:55:37 Canceled.
I had to restart winstrap. I'm not sure why it canceled but if that's intended it's confusing.

The linked to 'Windows GCE setup' seems outdated, a later version of winstrap is available and also I didn't need to run the tdm installer in 32-bit (I actually didn't know that was an option at the time).

Building go requires go. If it's required why not make it part of winstrap? I downloaded go1.4.3.windows-amd64.zip and unzipped it to %USERPROFILE%\Go1.4

Another thing I think would be good is checking the hashes of the installers.

Also - though this next thing has nothing to do with winstrap I couldn't figure out where to file it (and if I should do it somewhere else let me know where). The contribution guidelines say use googlesource to generate a password, and when I did that there's a 'Configure Git' with a cookie and instructions for Windows users. That powershell instruction didn't give the expected output on my machine because it split the cookie over two lines. You are using Write-Output but Write-Host might be better (though it usually isn't) since it doesn't break up the line according to the console line length. If you want to see what I mean open a command window and type:

powershell -noprofile -nologo -command Write-Output "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY" > foo
notepad foo

[bradfitz]

Winstrap is only updated occasionally when we need to update the Windows builder images. You can send fixes if you'd like, but us changing anything is very low priority until our builders stop working.

[jay]

I didn't offer a PR because I'm not sure of the best way to solve any of these things. The latest TDM installer is sure to keep changing and as it does the links to the older latest installer will break since they'll move it to a different folder. And I think the reason winstrap canceled trying to check out go was because although I installed git it wasn't in the path yet so it couldn't continue until I restarted.