Re: [PATCH 10/11] Add MSVC Project file

[Reece Dunn <msclrhd@googlemail.com>]

2009/8/17 Pau Garcia i Quiles <pgquiles@elpauer.org>:
> On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 10:43 PM, Reece Dunn<msclrhd@googlemail.com> wrote:
>> 2009/8/17 Pau Garcia i Quiles <pgquiles@elpauer.org>:
>>> On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 9:53 PM, Johannes
>>> Schindelin<Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Of course, we could have a script that verifies that the .vcproj files
>>>> contain reference the appropriate files (which it would know about by
>>>> being called from the Makefile and being passed the file names), maybe
>>>> even be able to edit the .vcproj file if it is missing some.  Should not
>>>> be too hard in Perl.
>>>
>>> You'll need to special-case for Visual C++ 2010, which is different
>>> and incompatible with previous versions. Hence my suggestion for
>>> CMake: appropriate project files would be generated for the tool the
>>> user chooses, be it VC++ 2005, VC++2010, gcc, Borland C++ or anything
>>> else.
>>
>> The problem is that you'd still need the Visual Studio projects (one
>> each for 6, 7 (2002), 7.1 (2003), 8 (2005), 9 (2008) and 10 (2010) --
>> yes, there'll need to be one for each version of Visual Studio) as
>> people who use Visual Studio tend to primarily use the IDE. CMake
>> (which Windows users will need to download & install from somewhere)
>> will sit outside this -- unless you mean making the project files be
>> the "Makefile project" type and simply use it to invoke CMake and host
>> the source files to ease access to them from the IDE?
>
> If a CMake build system is provided, you will not need a single Visual
> Studio project, or the autotools build system, or anything else. Just
> CMake and the CMake build system (which are a bunch of CMakeLists.txt
> plain text files).

Note that I said that people who use Visual Studio are more likely to
build and develop things through the Visual Studio IDE. Unless there
is IDE integration for it, they are not likely to use it.

For an automated build, CMake would probably work.

Looking around, it seems that CMake on Windows assumes that Microsoft
Visual C is used; that is, you have to explicitly specify CC for MinGW
or cygwin to build.

> CMake takes the CMakeLists.txt file(s) as the input and generates
> makefiles for gcc, vcproj files for Visual C++, makefiles for NMake,
> Eclipse projects for Eclipse, XCode projects for XCode, etc.
>
>> Also, not every posix system will have CMake installed (e.g. Linux
>> From Scratch systems) and that's not including "exotic" systems like
>> Solaris and the *BSDs.
>
> CMake is available for many platforms (Linux x86-32 and x86-64, PPC,
> Solaris Sparc, HP-UX, Irix, AIX PPC) as a binary from the CMake site (
> http://cmake.org/cmake/resources/software.html ) and as source for the
> rest.
>
> *BSD? It is available in the ports section (and maybe as a binary,
> too) in FreeBSD(
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/ports/devel/cmake/ ), NetBSD and
> OpenBSD.

Ok, I stand corrected there.

> Linux from scratch? If people are brave enough to build and use LFS,
> they are brave enough to build CMake (CMake is autocontained and
> bootstraps itself, it only depends on a C++ compiler to build itself).

At what about at the bootstrap stage? A C compiler will be available,
but a C++ one may not.

- Reece