On 6/29/07, Bob Jamison <rwjj@...127...> wrote:
Ted Gould wrote:
On Thu, 2007-06-28 at 11:09 -0500, Bob Jamison wrote:
Ted Gould wrote:
Is there a way to use the autotools build for win32? It's mighty frustrating that the builds are so different. We've run into that twice in the last couple days with the style-test and now this. At least we need to be reading the same file lists, though the same build options and such would be better.
Conversely, we could drop autotools. :-)
Well, honestly, of everything that's gone through the list on this I haven't seen anything as complete. And, I'm not really interesting in the Inkscape project having it's own build tool. Not to restart this whole conversation, but besides it's being complex, I'm not that unhappy with autotools.
--TedHeh. Of course not. I'm just saying that one is as valid as another as the "master" file list. It would be nice if some projects could agree on dependency lists. It is sad to admit it, but VC's XML project format is not bad.
[I have a feeling I've said all this before but here goes again anyway...]
I personally think using XML for describing builds is a bad idea, BUT if you want to do it that way, the Bakefile system does a pretty good job of it. The nice thing about bakefile is that it generates 100% native build solutions for a wide variety of compilers. It will generate autoconf stuff. It will generate Visual Studio projects. It will generate plain makefiles for a bunch of different compilers including MinGW. It's used by / developed by wxWidgets people. The idea is only core developers need to touch the bakefiles. Everyone else can just use the build files generated by it. The distinction makes a lot of sense for a library like wxWidgets. Not sure it makes so much sense for an app.
The other one that comes up a lot is CMake. It also generates more or less native solutions. I only have experience with the Visual Studio projects it generates. These aren't real visual studio projects though. They're like zombies that look like visual studio but have a lot of wierd stuff going on under the hood that is very unlike the way Visual Studio normally works. So I'm not so high on CMake from a user's perspective. The current buildtool.exe thing on Windows is MUCH less hassle than CMake.
SCons might also be a decent alternative if the Automake replacement stuff being worked on for Summer of Code works out.
--bb