Re: autoconf in pure MSVC environment?

[Bruce Korb]

"Brandon J. Van Every" wrote:
> No.  What happens in practice, is you have Cygwin vs. MinGW, building
> with Cygwin library vs. -fno-cygwin library, and support tools like GNU
> Make, bash, etc. all at different version levels.  The same is true for
> all the underlying open source libraries that a moderately complex
> project uses.  It's a nightmare. [[....]] "Things Fall Apart."
> 
> UNIXen tend to just glare at me when I bring these build issues up.  The
> reason they glare is they *NEVER* face these build issues themselves.

> > Likewise, I suppose the same thing could be said about most Windows
> > projects not being serious about support for Unixy systems.
> 
> Yes, absolutely.  But I haven't found an ideal cross-platform build
> system yet.  Ideally, such a system would output VS7.1 .sln files for
> the Windows users, and Makefiles for the UNIX users.  One
> Windows-centric project that acutally accomplishes this is The Nebula
> Device 3D engine.  http://nebuladevice.cubik.org  That is, I believe
> Linux builds are starting to happen now.  But it's all just custom TCL
> scripts, not a general purpose build tool.  I just asked them about what
> they did, and what wisdom they had.  Really, none to be had.
> 
> I realize that Microsoft has made the cross-platform build problem
> gratuitously hard, having dropped support for automatic Makefile
> generation as of VS7.  But UNIXen aren't any better.

Please explain to me carefully why I should put a lot of effort into
generating undocumented .sln files for a platform that I do not use,
when there is nobody paying me to do so?  It is true that "automake"
is completely wound up in emitting code for "make", but where is there
an engine for emitting ".sln" files that can be readily bolted to some-
thing that emits Makefile.am's?  Am I hearing you volunteering?