As chronicled in another thread, I attempted to get Freeciv to build
on Windows using the Eclipse Autotools plugin.  It's pretty much a
disaster because Make 3.81 and Eclipse are too stupid to agree on
pathname conventions.  Windows-style colon paths C:\ throw it off.  I
imagine that the MinGW-centric Wascana release of Eclipse
http://wascana.sourceforge.net/ will eventually solve the problems,
but right now Wascana 1.0 is in alpha.  Fixing things may also depend
on a release of Make 3.82 from GNU, which doesn't have any arrival
date as far as archives I've perused.

I tried to make a Visual Studio 2008 build of Freeciv.  Indeed it was
working, but VC9 does not support variable length arrays, so that
sounds like a non-starter around here.  Next I'm going to attempt an
Eclipse "Managed Make" build, sans autotools.  The point is to get a
build that actually works with an IDE and makes it easy to understand,
debug, and develop code.  My platform is Windows; Eclipse and
Code::Blocks seem to be what's available.  I've been down the Emacs /
XEmacs / vim / scite road before, and I can't say I'm thrilled about
it.  Code indexing and browsing in an IDE make it much easier to
understand a project for the 1st time.  Bonus points for not having to
read a bunch of arcana to set things up, which is what my last Emacs
experience was like, as far as trying to get tags to work and so
forth.

This leads me to my question.  Are any of you actually using IDEs that
work well with autotools somehow?  Do you have the modern conveniences
like clicking on a function name and being taken to the definition and
so forth?  Are your executables runnable and debuggable before doing
"make install"?  Do thinks behave in a manner that, well, keeps you
sane and isn't crufty?  I'm thinking it's a tall order to fulfill with
autotools, especially with my ex-CMake bias.  But who knows, maybe you
Unixen have stuff I'm not aware of.

How open are you guys to builds other than Autotools?  Yeah sure you
can run it lotsa places, but otherwise it's kind of a crufty
nightmare.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every

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