RE: autoconf in pure MSVC environment?

[Brandon J. Van Every]

John W. Eaton wrote:
> Brandon J. Van Every wrote:
>
> | In a UNIX universe, particularly a Linux universe,
> | libraries are nicely
> | packaged up and play well together.  These same UNIX
> | libraries are never
> | packaged up well on Windows, so the build environment can
> | almost never be duplicated.
>
> Doesn't Cygwin and its package system address some of this difficulty?

No.  What happens in practice, is you have Cygwin vs. MinGW, building
with Cygwin library vs. -fno-cygwin library, and support tools like GNU
Make, bash, etc. all at different version levels.  The same is true for
all the underlying open source libraries that a moderately complex
project uses.  It's a nightmare.  It's all completely broken crap.  It
works ok on UNIX because the tools are getting built, tested, and
updated all the time.  That testing never happens on Windows, so to
quote Chinua Achebe, "Things Fall Apart."

UNIXen tend to just glare at me when I bring these build issues up.  The
reason they glare is they *NEVER* face these build issues themselves.
They just assume I'm some kind of whiner.  They assume that UNIX
reproducibility is Cygwin / Mingw reproducibility.  It just ain't so.
You should think of those compilers as UNIX's bastard stepchildren, with
an extended Arabic family.

> Likewise, I suppose the same thing could be said about most Windows
> projects not being serious about support for Unixy systems.

Yes, absolutely.  But I haven't found an ideal cross-platform build
system yet.  Ideally, such a system would output VS7.1 .sln files for
the Windows users, and Makefiles for the UNIX users.  One
Windows-centric project that acutally accomplishes this is The Nebula
Device 3D engine.  http://nebuladevice.cubik.org  That is, I believe
Linux builds are starting to happen now.  But it's all just custom TCL
scripts, not a general purpose build tool.  I just asked them about what
they did, and what wisdom they had.  Really, none to be had.

I realize that Microsoft has made the cross-platform build problem
gratuitously hard, having dropped support for automatic Makefile
generation as of VS7.  But UNIXen aren't any better.  They only deal
with Makefiles, so really the attitude is "cross-platform, so long as
your platform is UNIX."


Cheers,                         www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

"We live in a world of very bright people building
crappy software with total shit for tools and process."
                                - Ed Mckenzie