Gambas Goes Ga-Ga When Compiling

[SteveDee]

I've just started experiencing problems when trying to create an exe or package using Gambas 2.13 under Ubuntu 9.10.

For example, I may use Project > Compile and the status bar says "Compiling Project Whatever.." and within a few seconds its done, no problem. But when I try to make an exe, it displays the "Compiling..." message, then after 7 or 8 secs the Gambas windows goes grey, and if I don't force it to quit it will produce a huge file (several GB in size).

So, does anyone know:-
1. if this is a known problem?
2. is there some useful way to debug compilation, like a log file somewhere that will tell me what is going on, or how far it got before failing?

[SteveDee]

What I've discovered is that Gambas does not appear to like other support files in the project directory. In the 2 projects that were giving me grief, I had included either graphics or sound files within the project folder.

For example, within Home/Gambas/myProject I had a sound file called bell.wav as this was used in my project. Within the IDE Project tree, this was shown under an imaginary directory called "Data", so it looks like Gambas understands why these files are there. However, when I try to Make an exe, this seems to confuse the compiler (presumably it scans this file using all available cpu time, then falls over!).

If I remove the bell.wav file, Gambas will happily create an exe, and I can also create an installation package. I get the same behaviour with graphics files (e.g. JPG, PNG).

In any case, it doesn't look like my support files (in this virtual Data directory) are included in the installation pacakage, which is part of the reason I put them there. It would be nice if there was a file similar to the setup.lst file in VB6, which could be manually edited to add/remove support files, and change other install options.

I must also mention that Gambas appears to be primarily for KDE. I run Gnome and have found there to be many Gnome specific problems, so this may turn out to be another. However, if you want to try to reproduce this problem, just create and save a new project. Then make sure you can create an exe (obviously your program won't do much). Now add either a sound file(.wav) or graphic (.png or .jpg) to the project folder, and try to create an exe once again. Please let me know if you succeed or fail!

One final point is that I also included a sub-directory in my projects called "exe" which is where I create the exe file. But moving this to a location outside the project directory did not affect this problem.