Re: [reSIProcate] dumping autotools and moving to CMake?
On 05/01/14 18:48, Scott Godin wrote:
> Anyone know of any good tools that could generate Visual Studio project
> files from autotools build configs? It might be nice to keep autotools and
> have some way of autogenerating the Windows build files too.
>
That is a valid option and I believe it has been discussed elsewhere
before in other projects - but I have not worked with any project where
it has been used in practice.
Depending upon the approach used, anybody tweaking the config may still
need a UNIX or Cygwin environment where they can run the ./configure script
The aim is to generate two things:
a) the build files for Windows
b) a config.h file for Windows users
Various strategies come to mind
a) ./configure can generate the Windows files at the same time it
generates each Makefile
b) create some new make target, e.g. "make winbuild-artifacts" that we
run in a similar way to "make dist".
c) make some script that is independent of autotools, that just
traverses the tree, scanning each Makefile.am for patterns like *.?xx
and putting them into a manifest for Windows tools
It is likely that all of approaches (a) and (b) would have to be
executed once on an autotools supported box so anybody wanting to tweak
their build would still need some UNIX access (or Cygwin).
If we just generate all the artifacts once when making a release
tarball, then it may mean that users will not be able to change any
config options easily without re-running the whole thing in a UNIX machine.