Toby Thain wrote: > > So we have stuff for VC6, VS2005, VS2008, DDK/WDK, MinGW and Cygwin. :) > > I consider diversity of working build environments a net benefit to > the project. It's another useful axis of portability and helps rub > off non-portable burrs.
I see your point and I agree in part, but personally I would e.g. prefer to ignore VC6, since it requires a fair amount source code workarounds because it's *so* old. Also, someone needs to maintain these build methods, and I wish people didn't have to spend time on that part so much. > > autotools is absolutely alien in Windows, and to be honest a bit > > of a hassle to set up if you're already a VS wizard. > > NMAKE is convenient for Windows builds as it will also happily run > under Linux/WINE, targeting both 32 and 64 bit Windows runtimes with > the 'freely downloadable' Express toolchain. It may even be possible > to combine autotools with the Microsoft compiler, though I haven't > tried it (CC="wine cl", etc). Maybe it works for cross-compiling, but then MinGW(-w64) will be way better tested so why bother, when for people on Windows it's no real help, they want the GUI stuff. Also, being a library, there are some more build options like e.g. enable debugging or not. This is typically a separate target in VS but only a configure switch with autotools, and while this case is easy enough, I don't think those targets scale so well.. Personally I'm missing a way to do some build-time scripting also on Windows. The best idea I've come up with so far is a .cmd which does some of what autoconf does, e.g. "sed" version number from configure.ac into .rc files and create a config.h, but that doesn't mean it's a very good idea. :\ //Peter
