[ovs-dev] Autoconf limits on Windows

[Ben Pfaff]

We're not switching to CMake.  If you have something to generate the
XML files you need, we'll check that in.

On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 11:23:37PM +0000, Alessandro Pilotti wrote:
> Visual Studio is the "de facto" IDE for Windows development. It provides all the features you'd expect from a modern environment (integrated debugger, refactoring tools, Git integration, syntax highlighting and a gazillion additional features) and in general it allows to be a few orders of magnitude more productive than a text editor and some command line tools.
> 
> For other scenarios, e.g. Python or other interpreted dynamic languages, I'm personally a great fan of simpler editors like Sublime, but I'd never even think of working in C/C++/C#/Java/etc without an IDE and especially an integrated debugger.
> 
> I can assure you that no Windows developer I ever met would ever accept to jump back in time 20 years and use vi as her/his main productivity tool. :-) If this port is meant to attract more Windows community contributors then Visual Studio support is substantially mandatory.
> 
> Said that, if in your intentions the project is not meant to be developed on Windows but only compiled to produce the binaries, well, makefiles are enough. 
> 
> I suggest to take a tour of other well known cross platform projects and see how those manage the Windows builds. You'll see that some of them consider Windows as a platform for builds only (basically no development), some use CMake to support all the required platforms (Qt5, MySQL, FreeRDP come to mind) and some use separate build systems (CPython, Apache, just to name a couple).
> 
> If you're interested we can record a quick webcast to show how to use Visual Studio for Open vSwitch development activities. This might help in clarifying some of the statements above.
> 
> As a final note, Visual Studio files are just XML files, so generating them dynamically is not that complicated if we really have to.
> 
> Alessandro
> 
> > On 26/nov/2013, at 00:18, "Gurucharan Shetty" <shettyg at nicira.com> wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > Sent from my iPhone
> > 
> >> On Nov 25, 2013, at 5:05 PM, Jesse Gross <jesse at nicira.com> wrote:
> >> 
> >> They're the equivalent of makefiles for Visual Studio. Without them
> >> you can't use the Windows-native development tools so while it's not
> >> impossible to work it certainly makes life more difficult.
> > 
> > One can still edit the files using a vi editor (or any other simple editor)on windows and do a make. Probably the disadvantage is that you can't use visual studio ide to write code(?).
> > 
> > 
> >> 
> >>> On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 1:53 PM, Ben Pfaff <blp at nicira.com> wrote:
> >>> What I'm trying to get at is, what are the "solution and related
> >>> projects" good for?  The non-Windows world does fine without them, so
> >>> if "make" can work on Windows then why is the result "basically
> >>> useless for any practical development purpose"?
> >>> 
> >>>> On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 04:50:40PM -0500, Ethan Jackson wrote:
> >>>> My understanding is that Guru is working on a solution to this
> >>>> problem.  What were your thoughts?
> >>>> 
> >>>> Ethan
> >>>> 
> >>>>>> On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 3:52 PM, Ben Pfaff <blp at nicira.com> wrote:
> >>>>>> On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 08:11:00PM +0000, Alessandro Pilotti wrote:
> >>>>>> We did some testing with autoconf / automake on Windows. Makefiles
> >>>>>> are getting generated correctly although we cannot obviously verify
> >>>>>> the result with a full build since we didn?t port all the patches to
> >>>>>> the master branch yet.
> >>>>>> 
> >>>>>> There?s anyway a huge limitation: it does not generate a Visual
> >>>>>> Studio solution and related projects, which means that it?s
> >>>>>> basically useless for any practical development purpose.
> >>>>> 
> >>>>> What are those files good for?
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