Switching (back) to MSVC (Re: [Vm-dev] What generates disabledPlugins.c?0

[David T. Lewis]

On Thu, Jul 22, 2010 at 02:15:01PM -0700, Andreas Raab wrote:
> 
> On 7/22/2010 12:07 PM, Geoffroy Couprie wrote:
> >    I'm not sure I understand. What point is there in "generating"
> >    Makefiles? I've never generated any Makefiles for my builds, why
> >    would an extra indirection be advantageous?
> >
> >Again, for convenience: you can detect if all the required libraries are
> >present, add user specified paths (instead of hard-coded paths in the
> >actual Makefile), and if you add files to the cross directory, you only
> >have to modify one file to enable compilation on Windows and Linux.
> >I can understand if you prefer writing Makefiles by hand, instead of
> >using autotools, but CMake is really easy to use, and can create
> >Makefiles for Linux, MSVC and MinGW, with no extra effort.
> 
> Seriously? You mean that if I drop the stuff from 
> http://eleves.ec-lille.fr/~couprieg/divers/patches.zip into my build 
> tree cmake will magically generate MSVC build files and it'll just work? 
> If that's actually true, I'm sold :-)
> 
> I'll try it tonight.

It's possible that it actually *is* true. This is exactly what CMake
was designed to do (hence the name, "Cross-platform Make"). Whether
it works as advertised I can't say. Frankly I'm not entirely sure
why Ian went to the considerable effort of moving to CMake just for
the sake of the unix source tree, but I suspect it was mainly a
matter of running out of patience with the autoconf mess. Given that
he did go to all that effort, and given that Geoffroy went to the
extra effort of getting it to work on Windows also, well...  who
knows, maybe it will turn out to be worth the trip.

Note, IIUC Geoffroy's work is focused on building unix and Windows
targets from a unix host, so it might not be what you would have in
mind for a native Windows build process (Geoffroy, please correct
me if I misunderstand).

Dave

p.s. Personally, I'm with Eliot - I can't stand any of these things,
and I think it's great if somebody else wants to work on it ;-)