Next Windows Release Planning

[machawk1]

A potential WAIL user (Sean Lehning) expressed interest in the project, tried to used the Windows version, and encountered catastrophic failures. A new version of WAIL for Windows has not been released since 2013. This is unacceptable.

There are many GitHub issues in this repo that are "nice to have"s but this has been part of the source of delay. In this GitHub issue, I will document what is critically needed for another release. The nice-to-haves can wait.

Critical

• 370 (needs verification) Errors in using latest release of WAIL for Windows

• 270 (needs validation) Cannot get 2013.2.19 to work in Windows

• 265 Unable to start archive Now! on windows- WindowsError: [Error 2] The system cannot find the file specified

• 163 Wayback status is not updated in the UI once launched on Windows

• 162 (needs Win10 relevancy) Install into the C:\Programs* folder instead of the root of the C drive on Windows

• 159 Launch WebUI button does not display Heritrix interface in browser in Windows

• 133 Kill Heritrix button likely does not work from Windows

• 95 (needs verification to latest source) Windows UI is scaled, causes widget displacement

• 11 (needs verification to latest source) Check for Heritrix accessibility fails even if Heritrix is accessible

• 5 JRE/JDK checks prevent use on Windows

• 3 Unable to Control Tomcat start/stop from Advanced UI

Relevant/Meta Nice-to-Haves

• 378: Add Windows screenshots to https://machawk1.github.io/wail/ alongside macOS screenshots

• 81 (needs validation) wont work windows 7

• 65 (needs validation) Launch WebUI does not open web browser on Windows 7

[machawk1]

Bumped due date to Friday, because they are good days to release software. 😁

[ValmerHigginsworth]

I came here after installing WAIL today and having the same error that kanihal described in this thread: https://github.com/machawk1/wail/issues/265

I have a Windows machine and WAIL looks like exactly the kind of tool I would like to use for my web archiving work, so thank you so much for working on this!

[machawk1]

@ValmerHigginsworth Thanks for the report. I have yet to find the time to devote to debugging the Windows version. I understand the current release is very outdated, particularly with respect to the macOS version, but building from source resolves many issue compared to the last release. I do not expect you to need to do this.

[machawk1]

I was able to secure a Windows 10 virtual environment. After cloning the latest master (e26e87c2eb3fb9095bb8e0272d931d956e9edd73), installing Python3, setting the PATH, I was able to build and launch WAIL for Windows.

There are, of course, still issues, but this shows that the revised interface since the changes to the macOS version can be propagated.

Edit: note that I had to remove black, among some macOS-specific module references in requirements.txt for the build process to complete. This needs to be replicated and understood.

[machawk1]

I anticipate a new release in the next two weeks inclusive of some fixes and other functionality. I do not currently have the capacity to fully test on Windows, so the state of the above fixes should be evaluated prior to release to determine what remains.