[LLVMdev] VS build is broken again

[Morten Ofstad]

Cyrille Berger wrote:
> On Sunday 18 May 2008, Óscar Fuentes wrote:
>> Chris Lattner <sabre at nondot.org> writes:
>>
>> [snip]
>>
>>> Others have suggested alternative build systems before like cmake.
>>> Apparently cmake can autogenerate VC++ and Xcode project files from
>>> the same thing that it builds from on unix systems.
>> cmake creating VC++ project files does not appeal much to me. First,
>> project files are not mandatory for using MS compiler.
> cmake can create nmake files as well. It's also possible to add a different 
> generator that use something else (even one that would output to gmake and 
> use msvc compiler and gcc for header dependencies ;) ).

For what it's worth, I think that using a system like cmake, while lessening the load of the LLVM developers, increases 
the load on users of LLVM. I'm building a piece of software and I have to deal with each external dependency using it's 
own favourite build system - the end result is that to build my software I have to use SCons, bjam, cmake, Visual Studio 
_and_ nmake.

In my opinion the best solution is if the software comes with project files/makefiles that are 'native' to the platform 
you're building on and doesn't require any extra software to be installed before you can build. I've had good results 
with using scripts to keep .vcproj files updated in order to synchronize project files between different versions of 
Visual Studio. The same method should be applicable to synchronizing with makefiles and XCode project files. If anything 
more complicated than adding/removing files need to be done, it can be done by hand - but that's pretty rare anyway.

m.