Thanks for the clarification as this has given me a better understanding in terms of the build setup used by LO. My question now becomes why is it so hard to get a proper build environment setup for buidling LO on windows, as well as it being easier to break out of all the platforms supported.
On Sun, Apr 28, 2013 at 9:54 AM, Christian Lohmaier < lohmaier+ooofut...@googlemail.com> wrote: > Hi Jonathan, *, > > On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 7:46 PM, Jonathan Aquilina > <eagles051...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Rainer what i want to understand is why use an external build tool when > > there is an equivalent to make built directly into visual studio. > > You are completely missing the point here. The default build /does/ > use Visual Studio Compiler, that is the default setup/the only > officially supported one to begin with. > > mingw ist not a make system, but a compiler. > nmake is not a compiler, but a make-tool. > > Replacing one by the other just doesn't work, since they do completely > different things. > > LO uses gnu make as its make-tool since that is available to all > relevant systems and supports the features that are needed. > > And if you're wondering why the build uses the Microsoft compiler instead: > > https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Windows_Build_Dependencies#Why_MSVC.3F > ###### > Why MSVC? > > It is a frequently asked question, usually coming from free software > purists, why we use proprietary compiler instead of a free one (e.g. > gcc). > > ABI backwards-compatibility for compiled extensions. There is some > resistance to breaking that - also so far MSVC produces faster, > smaller binaries. > > There are also some features in the code that don't compile with > MinGW. They use API that MinGW does not provide headers for etc. > > In addition to above points also there are also open questions around > how we would run unit tests in a MinGW cross-compilation environment > and how well gdb works on Windows; the MSVC C++ debugger is really > quite good. > ###### > > You're comparing apples and oranges. That just doesn't make any sense. > > ciao > Christian > -- Jonathan Aquilina -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
