Agreed on all points. I believe the project should be completely agnostic regarding platforms - this is one of the reasons I didn’t use cygwin/mingw when I ported to windows, and don’t rely on any Unix-specific APIs (those are abstracted over in the platform directory).
The corollary to this of course is that we can’t have anything which makes the codebase less easy to work with on other platforms. A developer on OS X or Linux should be able to build and work with the code with the same degree of ease as someone on windows. An example of something that would work against this goal is including visual studio projects in the repository if they're not kept consistent with the cross-platform CMakeLists.txt files. The one and only non-“native” thing we need is CMake, and that’s to bootstrap the system. Once someone has CMake installed and knows how to use it (which we should provide clear instructions for), everything else can be done the windows way, with the exception of adding files or changing build options (which required updating CMakeLists.txt and re-running cmake). — Dr Peter M. Kelly [email protected] PGP key: http://www.kellypmk.net/pgp-key <http://www.kellypmk.net/pgp-key> (fingerprint 5435 6718 59F0 DD1F BFA0 5E46 2523 BAA1 44AE 2966) > On 2 Jan 2015, at 2:31 am, Dennis E. Hamilton <[email protected]> wrote: > > I don't think preferences for Visual Studio are all that clearcut. There is > much to like about the Visual Studio IDE and how it works in a code and test > and fix and repeat cycle of activity. But that is only when building for > Windows on Windows. > > We have to be careful about two things: > > 1. Many Visual Studio users have never been taught any other way to build > code, even though there is full support for makefile usage, command-line > building, and also growing cross-platform support in Visual Studio. > > 2. Open source projects that treat Windows as an appendage case are very > inaccessible to Windows developers because of the Fibber McGee's Closet > tooling that seems to be some sort of normal for getting something to build > along with considerable investment in custom scripts (using from M4 to Perl > to Python and almost anything else). > > So there is the way that VS is appealing to Windows developers as grounded in > what they know, but there is also some need to recognize how repellant many > open-source projects appear to developers who, know it or not, are relying on > a consistent structure for which complexity is noticed only when the need > arises. > > Now our challenge is, I assume, multi-platform development using a common > core source code along with whatever the adaptation mechanism is for > different targets. So we have to be more ecumenical in how the code can be > approached by developers with different interests. > > I think it is unlikely that we can make the compilable parts of Corinthia > look like a Visual Studio solution consisting of one or more Visual C > projects (compilation steps) and tests to the point where a Visual Studio > developer can ignore all else. I'm not even clear that it is a good idea. > > Just a concern I have, > > - Dennis > > -----Original Message----- > From: jan i [mailto:[email protected]] > Sent: Wednesday, December 31, 2014 09:22 > To: [email protected]; Dennis Hamilton > Subject: Re: Anybody who know how to write .cmd or .bat files for windows ? > > [ ... ] > - Products like Cygwin, have scared AOO developers, so I dont want we > depend on such products, do we agree on this ? > (Windows developers in general only like visual studio, and maybe a > couple of external libs) > [ ... ] >
