Comment 0 for bug 853196

I am working on getting Scribes to work on Windows. I could get Scribes to start under a cygwin enviroment (details later on),
 but it throws a
PLUGIN ERROR!
ERROR: Cannot find plugin folder. Scribes will not function properly without plugins. Please file a bug report to address the issue.

If I close the error window i can type in the document, and the autosave feature is working, but there is no menu.
This is probably a problem in my setup more than in Scribes, but I figured you could explain why this is going on and where
I have to go look for a solution.

I'll explain now how I got Scribes to start under Cygwin.

1. Install cygwin from www.cygwin.com

2. Follow the instructions on http://sourceware.org/cygwinports/ to add thier gnome packages to your mirror lists.
This will make cygwin look up both the official packages and those from Cygports. Be sure to select both mirrors!
 TIP: the main repository of sourceware.org was horribly slow for me, use the sourceforge one the get better results.

3. Install the following packages:
 bzr
 gnome-common
 gnome-doc-utils
 yelp
 pygtk
 gtk
 xinit (xorg server)
 dbus
 gcc-core
 make
 python-dbus
 python-gtk2
 python-gtksourceview2
 python-gtkspell
 python-xdg

4. Lauch the cygwin bash shell and type these commands (don't type ">", it's just to higlight the commands): (might take some time)
>bzr branch lp:scribes
>cd scribes

Open the file autogen.sh and change REQUIRED_AUTOMAKE_VERSION=1.9 to REQUIRED_AUTOMAKE_VERSION=1.11

>./autogen.sh
>make
>make install (NOTE: i didn't use sudo because cygwin doesn't have it, I still have to do some research to see if there is something equivalent)

Rename scribes.in to scribes.py

Start the program X-Server under Cygwin/X
launch scribes from the xterm windows inside the X-Server:
>dbus-launch python scribes.py

And this is it!

I don't know if this belongs here but it's the rationale for using Cygwin:

The other option to making Scribes run on Windows was to get a Windows version of all the dependecies and then change Scribes to be platform agnostic. I did some step in that direction, but Scribes uses fork to create multiple process (I guess for the autosave feature?), which is not available on Windows. Changing Scribes to be platform agnostic with respect to multithreading is out of my possibilities, if even possible, because of how spawing multiple process differs between Linux and Windows. That's why I abandoned this idea and tried out Cygwin instead.

And in the end that's my scribes -i output:
$ ========================================================
System Info: ('CYGWIN_NT-5.1', '1e2fa2f662c847b', '1.7.9(0.237/5/3)', '2011-03-29 10:10', 'i686')
Python Version: 2.6.7 (r267:88850, Jun 5 2011, 18:50:27)
[GCC 4.5.3]
System Byteorder: little
Python Modules: ('__builtin__', '__main__', '_ast', '_codecs', '_sre', '_symtable', '_warnings', 'errno', 'exceptions', 'gc', 'imp', 'marshal', 'posix', 'pwd', 'signal', 'sys', 'thread', 'xxsubtype', 'zipimport')
========================================================
Scribes Version: 0.4-dev-build985
Dbus Version: (0, 84, 0)
GTK+ Version: (2, 24, 5)
PyGTK Version: (2, 24, 0)
Psyco Not Installed
========================================================
Running Instance: 0
========================================================
Python Path: /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages
Plugin Path: /usr/lib/scribes/GenericPlugins
Data Path: /usr/share/scribes
Executable Path: /usr/bin
========================================================